Beaver? You mean vagina?

Neil Gaiman posted this little news item today, about which he comments, "[this] seems, somehow, to miss the point on a scale that's positively awesome."

It will never cease to amaze me that we live in a culture where people will take their children to a movie theater to watch a man being flayed and scourged for three hours, but manage to take offense at the public display of the word "VAGINA."

This is an actual word. It's in the dictionary and everything. Doctors and scientists use this word. It has no particular connotation. It is not, generally speaking, considered vulgar or obscene. If the play was called "The Cunt Monologues" or something, yeah, I can imagine being a bit miffed by it. But, clearly, it wasn't somebody who was offended by vulgar language who complained. It was somebody who was driving by with her niece in the car, and was, "offended I had to answer the question."

Bad enough that an idiot was offended by having to tell a young girl the proper name for a body part she owns one of, bad enough that she complained to the theater, but worst of all, the idiotic management of the theater, upon hearing the complaint, didn't immediately reply, "Lady, you're an idiot!" No, they said, "Okee dokee," and promptly put a stupid and meaningless replacement title - "The Hoohaa Monologues" - up on their marquee.

These are the kind of people who shouldn't be allowed to run a theater - if you're that unwilling to stand up for art, for free expression, you're in the wrong business. If you're willing to bow to a single complaint, what are you going to do when the Decency League decides to mount a boycott? What are you going to do when the government tries to shut you down on obscenity charges? If you aren't going to stand up for art at every turn, what's the point?

Nerd Classic: Star Wars Lite

"This is very cute," Emily says. "I bet it was pretty cool when you were seven."

"Eight," I say, the teensiest note of defensiveness perhaps creeping into my voice. Internally, I am agog. I am aghast. Cute? That's the best thing she can say about it?

We're watching The Last Starfighter, which I have described to her on multiple occasions as "fucking awesome." And it is, too. For those of you who may not have seen this gem of the mid-'80s bonanza of "Star Wars rip-off/Spielberg-lite" flicks, The Last Starfighter tells the story of Alex Rogan, your standard-issue "kid with a good heart who wants something more out of life but can't catch a break." After setting a record high score on the "Starfighter" arcade game - in a supremely goofy scene where every resident of Alex's trailer park peers over his shoulders as he plays and all get absurdly excited about his video-game prowess - Alex is recruited by Centauri, the "inventor of the 'Starfighter' game" (Robert Preston, who is the biggest name the movie's got, and is terrific) to join the actual Starfighter Corps in the fight against the evil Xur and the Kodan Armada.

I'll admit, it's chock-full of '80s Cheez. It hits pretty much every cliche dead-on. Like every teenager in every movie made in the 1980s, Alex is always trying to get away to "the Lake" with his girlfriend. There's a younger brother who looks like a cute moppet but actually has a stash of Playboys under his mattress. There's a complete flock of Wacky Neighbors. There's a comical sidekick.

As it turns out, it's not the piece of Brilliant Cinema I recall from my childhood. It's a bit light, overall, running only about ninety minutes. In an age where The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, all of 100 pages as a novel, becomes a three-hour extravaganza, this is a little jarring. It doesn't establish much about the Star League that Alex is recruited to defend except that it exists and is in peril. It doesn't spend any time establishing anything about the villains, Xur and the Kodan Armada, except that they exist and want to destroy the Star League. I would gladly give this movie an extra half-hour or forty-five minutes of my time to create a more fully-realized sense of place and conflict. What's there is an awful lot of fun, I just wanted it to pack a little more punch.

I think there's some potential here for a remake. As Wil Wheaton (who had a cutting-room-floor role in The Last Starfighter) wrote recently, the video arcade is going the way of the drive-in theater.* But I can easily imagine the story being updated for the era of home video-gaming. Heck, the studio could probably even get a minor bidding war going between Microsoft and Sony to see whether Alex would play "Starfighter" on an XBox or a PlayStation. Flesh things out a little more, let ILM or Weta or whoever create some kickass space battles (though, truly, the film's early-days-of-CGI visual effects hold up remarkably well), and you've got a movie for which I wouldn't hesitate for a nanosecond to plunk down my $9.50.

Of course, remakes are the soulless work of Satan, generally speaking. Don't get me wrong, this movie is still fairly entertaining as-is. Emily says she thought it was too much like a low-rent version of Ender's Game for her to really enjoy, but I disagree. I think it's got a lot of neat ideas in it, and any similarities to EG are coincidental and meaningless at most. It's sort of like the skeleton of a great movie that had the skin applied too soon. I just wish it had a little more meat on the bones.


* I'm linking to Wheaton's blog instead of the actual piece, because it appears on Suicide Girls which has boobies on it sometimes and is therefore sometimes NSFW and is often blocked by IT. But if you can, you should click through and read the whole column, because it's highly entertaining and is a serious trip down memory lane for Gen-X/Y types who grew up on Pac-Man and Gauntlet and Golden Axe (my personal favorite) and such.

Gayness

So, apparently, Ted Haggard says he is "completely heterosexual" after emerging from three weeks of counseling. Good for him, I guess. Whatever it takes for him to go on thinking that the homos are evil and choosing to embark on a life of wickedness and sin, and all he was doing when he had sex with another man was "acting out." Good for him.

In a related story, a leopard at the San Diego Zoo announced today that he had changed his spots. Sammy, a three-year-old Amur Leopard said that he was, "completely striped," and any former spotted characteristics he may have exhibited were merely "acting out."

Keel Da Heeroez, unt Teengs Uff Dat Naychuh.

Bat-Meme courtesy Random Panels...

Friday with the Kids - "Exhibition Shirling"

The Kids in the Hall introduce us to Scotland's favorite sport.

1-31 Never Forget

Here's some YouTube doofuses with teh funny on LiteBriteGate.

LEDs + Batteries + Circuit Board = NOOKYALUR BOMB!

So, as you may have heard, the entire city of Boston was basically shut down yesterday due to a "bomb scare." Here's the CNN story about it. Two men planted what the Assistant Attorney General, an idiot, called "bomblike devices" all around the city. The Attorney General, also an idiot, said the devices, "had a very sinister appearance. It had a battery behind it, and wires." That's right, according to the Attorney General of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, anything that has a battery and wires is "sinister" and more than likely a bomb.

Here's a handy tip for any of the many, many idiots in America who may be reading this: Bombs do not, generally speaking, have lights on them, especially not LEDs in the shape of a cartoon character. Just because it has a battery and wires doesn't mean it's a bomb. If real terrorists are planting real bombs, they're not studding them with blue lights and placing them in easily visible places, as the bombs have a much better chance of going off and doing the damage the terrorists would like them to do if they're not spotted beforehand. I know this is difficult for you to comprehend, idiots that you are, but just because something is electronic and you don't know for sure what it is, that doesn't automatically mean it's a bomb.

These "sinister bomb-like devices" that caused so much trouble in Boston were also planted in nine other major cities with little to no difficulty. It's a dumb guerrilla marketing campaign for a silly cartoon show. Some idiot in Boston, though, saw lights and wires and thought, naturally, "Oh, no, a bomb!" Out come the SWAT teams and the bomb squads.

Here's the best part - the MBTA is going to ask Turner Broadcasting, owner of the network that airs the cartoon, to reimburse the expenses incurred by the "bomb scare." What's that letter going to look like? "We, as a city, are in general to dumb to realize that a bunch of lights aren't a bomb, and our stupidity cost us a ton of dough. If you would, we'd appreciate if you'd compensate us for said stupidity."

Sheesh.

Comic Life, Indeed

Created with Comic Life, the MacBook's iSight camera, and brownies that Mle made.

Click on the comic to see the larger version - it's ginormous!

Dial H

Warning to Monkey and maybe others: mild, essentially meaningless "Heroes" spoilers may be included in the following.

Readers may recall from a few months back my disenchantment with Studio 60. I'm watching it now with some mild level of interest. Why?

Because of the promised and sure-to-be-brief guest appearance by Masi Oka.

I don't think I've expounded enough on my massive love for Studio 60's lead-in, Heroes. I couldn't possibly love this show any more. It's as if some TV Guy out there said, "Hey, I wonder what might be exactly the TV show that Dan Stokes most wants to watch." And then TV Guy, telepathic-Matt-Parkman-style, plucked that idea right out of my head and put it on TV. It's got a schlubby telepathic cop, a Wolverine cheerleader (that is to say, not a Wolverine cheerleader, but rather a cheerleader with similar powers to Wolverine), a time-traveling Japanese nerd (and his sidekick), a guy who's a power chameleon (one of the coolest, most interesting powers I've ever seen in any super-heroish kind of thing), and the staple of any quality television show, a Creepy Guy. Actually, two Creepy Guys. Actually...well, there's no shortage of Creepy Guys, but most especially deserving of mention are Adrian Pasdar as Creepy Flying Politician Guy and the spiritual heir to X-Files' Cigarette Smoking Man, Jack Coleman as Creepy Spectacle Wearing Dad of the Wolverine Cheerleader (Who Has a Hidden Agenda) Guy. It's got an evil serial killer and a world-is-in-peril-but-how?-and-why? mystery. It's got a goofy catchphrase - Save the cheerleader, save the world! It's got fun and interesting characters, it's got compelling plotlines, and every single episode ends in a smashing, gotta-see-it-next-week cliffhanger.

And, as of this week, it's got Sulu.*

Nerdy as fuck, I tells ya. But, as you may know, nerdy as fuck is right up my alley.


Studio 60, by the way, is better than it was, but still not all that good, and the Masi Oka appearance was, as expected, blink-and-you-miss-it brief.



*If Sulu's not your favorite old-school Star Trek character aside from the Kirk/Spock/McCoy trinity, you're wrong, and I'll fight anyone who says different.

Stumble

I've just added StumbleUpon to my browser - if you're using Firefox, like I do, and if you like to waste ungodly amounts of time discovering random stuff on the internet, like I do, StumbleUpon is a must.

And if you're not using Firefox (at least on a computer where you're not forced by some crappy IT department to use Internet Exploder), what the hell's wrong with you? Go download that sumbitch, right now! I'll keep myself entertained.


Mahna mahna...doot do do do do...Mahna Mahna...doot do do do...


Back? Okay, great! Now go get the StumbleUpon add-on. It's seriously one of the coolest things ever. I've been playing with it for an hour now, and discovered dozens of cool things that I otherwise would never have seen. Like this. And this. And this. And this. I told the thing that I was interested in drawing, in photography, in magic tricks and in astronomy (among other things), clicked a button, and it took me to all these cool sites.

Aw, Shit.

I'll tell you who I hate: everyone.

Wait, I was channeling Death Wore a Feathered Mullet for a second there. I don't hate everyone.

I do, however, hate the yuppie condo dwellers who live in the high-rise condos that surround Cheesman Park.

Cheesman Park is where I go running, and I do it even now, when the running trail has three inches of snow-compacted-to-ice covered in an inch of slippery slush on it and occasional patches of disgusting, sloppy mud. I don't mind the ice, and I don't mind the slush, and I actually kind of like the mud. What drives me nuts, though is that the yuppie condo dwellers take their dogs out into the park to shit (the dogs, not the yuppies, I presume). By "into the park" I mean "no further into the park than absolutely necessary while chatting about useless bullshit on cellphones." And by "no further into the park than absolutely necessary" I mean "onto the running trail."

Ordinarily, this isn't a problem. Denver's full of dogs, and 99% of dog owners are, most of the time, quite conscientious about carrying their little plastic baggies with them. But somehow, when there's snow and/or ice on the ground, it's like all rules and common courtesies are suddenly erased. There is shit everywhere on that trail, man. It's like running through a minefield. I don't understand it. "Oh, it's snowy out here. That means it's okay to leave my dog's foul, steaming mess of fecal matter right here where he left it." Yeah, perfectly alright - it's not as though hundreds of people are running or walking on that trail every day. Dogshit just dissolves in snow anyway, right?

As it turns out, it does. Well, anyway, when it's been snowed on, frozen, thawed, snowed on, frozen, thawed a few times, and the temperature gets into the forties for the first time in weeks...well, it doesn't really dissolve, but it certainly becomes more liquid than usual.

Fuckin'...um, rage isn't my specialty. Help me out here, Todd - cuntrags? Cuntmeisters?

In the News - Hollywood Breaks Collective Arm Patting Itself on Back

The Academy Award nominations came out this morning, and I'm amazed. Not by what was nominated, or by who was snubbed. I'm stunned because I've seen only one of the films nominated for Best Picture, none of the performances nominated for Best Actor or Best Actress and one performance each (in the same film) from the Supporting categories. So at this point, I've got no one to root for except Martin Scorsese. I have no idea whether his movie is any good or not (though I think I can safely assume that it is), but the fact that the always pedestrian poor-man's-Spielberg Opie Cunningham owns a Best Director Oscar and Martin Scorsese does not is simply unjust and must be corrected.

Pan's Labyrinth

When Em and I saw The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe last Xmas, she turned to me when Mr. Tumnus, the faun, appeared on-screen for the first time and whispered, "He's hot!" Last night, we saw El Laberinto del Fauno, or as it's being called in English, Pan's Labyrinth. I guess the folks in charge of coming up with and English title figured that most Americans don't know what a faun is. Or maybe they decided that Pan's Labyrinth is catchier than The Labyrinth of the Faun (and I suppose they're probably right on both counts) - but I digress. The point is that Em didn't mention thinking the faun was hot at any point during or after last night's screening.

The faun is, in fact, quite creepy, and is one among many. Pan's Labyrinth is a fairy tale in the old, pre-Disney sense of the term. It's got a magical quest, it's got fairies and monsters, but it's definitely not about sweetness and light and "happily ever after." It's dark (not to be all emo on you here; in this case, the term is apt), it's disturbing and unsettling, and it's without a doubt the best movie I've seen in a long, long time.

One of the reasons I loved this movie is that it is concerned with aspects of storytelling that fascinate me personally - the fine line between fantasy and reality, the value of escapism alongside its perils, and the way all of us cling to fantasies of our own that help us get through our lives. As viewers, we're free to interpret as we see fit. Perhaps the young heroine, Ofelia, is only imagining it when the faun tells her that she is the long-lost princess of a magical realm. If so, she's not that much different than her mother, her stepfather, or many others in the film who cling desperately to delusions of their own, less fantastic than Ofelia's though probably no more realistic.

There are monsters in Ofelia's perhaps-imaginary realm - creepiest of all is the one I've dubbed the "Eyeball Monster," as pictured above - but in the end, they pale in comparison to the monster who dominates Ofelia's life and the film. Every fairy tale needs a good villain, and Pan's Labyrinth has a great one. Captain Vidal, Ofelia's stepfather, is brutal and sadistic, but both the writer/director and the actor manage to keep him just on the right side of the line between fantastic, compelling villain and silly, cartoonish mustache-twirler.

This movie was, for me, the kind that Roger Ebert refers to as an out-of-body experience. I became so wrapped up in it that I more or less forgot I was watching a movie and felt that I was there, that it was an experience I was having personally. I can't recommend it highly enough. If it's playing anywhere near you, anywhere within 50 miles, it's worth the drive, it's worth the time, and it's more than worth the nine bucks.

Enjoy.

Mahna Mahna.

Doot do do-do-do.

Now, roll 12d6, or 6d12, or something...

Steve from Something Awful wants you to be able to make a sweet D&D character, and so do I.

This is so much like the process I went through to make a character when I was 13, it's scary. These days, on the rare occasions I get to play nerdgames, I like to play something that's a little more subtle - thieves and clerics and suchlike. But back in the day, my friends and I all made badass fighters and spent every gaming session beating the crap out of orcs and trolls and stuff, because none of us was capable of doing anything more interesting than that.

Damn, I've started speaking nerd without noticing again. Lemme put it this way - imagine what The Lord of the Rings movies would have been like if every one of the main characters was Conan the Barbarian as played by Arnold Schwarzenegger.

It's Here!

And, as you may have heard, it's got a built-in camera. Hi, everybody!

No more being stuck with Em's work computer, hooray! I can download programs - goodbye, MS Internet Exploder, hello Mozilla Firefox! Hello, Flickr Uploadr! Hello, Skype (as soon as I get a microphone, anyway)...

Wikid cool, man.

Don't Be a Fool, Stryker!

I'm not really what you'd call a SNAG, actually (that's Sensitive New Age Guy, for those not in the know). But I do feel some empathy for Mike Buday of Los Angeles who has enlisted the aid of the ACLU to sue the state of California to make it easier for him to take his wife's last name.

Now, Emily and I are NOT OFFICIALLY ENGAGED. This is a very important detail to remember. NOT OFFICIALLY ENGAGED. NOT NOT NOT. But we discuss such matters with increasing frequency. So we're maybe Planning to Be Engaged at Some Nearish Future Date. Amongst our discussions, we've come to the conclusion that neither of us has any particular attachment to our surnames. I don't have any particular problem with mine, but I feel no driving need to keep/perpetuate it, either. Em is not really a huge fan of her last name, either, so she's more than willing to change it.

So, progressive, cutting-edge types that we are, we're probably both going to change to something entirely new when the time comes. The front-runner so far is Stryker, which combines most of the letters of our current surnames, and is a totally kickass name, to boot. Plus, if we were to have kids--that's IF, mind you, not when but IF (Hi, Mom!)--we could give them cool names like Ace and Duke. Seriously, who's going to mess with Duke Stryker? Duke Stryker is probably packing heat, and probably knows 17 ways to kill a man unarmed. And they'll probably grow up to be something cool, like superspies or glamorous international jewel thieves.

Anyway, when we discussed such things, I always just assumed that it would be a simple matter of going down to the County office, filling out a couple of forms and paying a $50 fee. Not nearly so simple, as it turns out. You have to fill out a ton of forms, undergo a criminal background check (not too surprising, when you think about it), appear before a judge or magistrate, publish intent to change your name in the newspaper at least three times over 21 days...yeesh.

School Supplies

My Dad has always been a PC guy, and we always had PCs in the house when I was growing up. But, as you might imagine with a graphic design program, I'm using Macs in school. And honestly, I like them better. Maybe the shared fashion sense, if we go by the picture.

I bought a Macbook today - and it felt just a little weird, like buying Pepsi after a lifetime of drinking Coke. Except that there's a discernable difference between a Mac and a PC, so maybe it's more like...I donno - rednecks fight to the death about whether Ford is better than Chevy or vice-versa, so maybe it's like that. I donno. It's like something, though, that's for sure.

Clicking "Process My Order" was just a wee bit nerve-wracking, though. I don't think I've ever spent anything close to that on a single purchase in my life. Add to that the $250 I spent on textbooks this afternoon, and it was an expensive day.

Still, nerve-wracking or not, I'm pretty excited about my new toy. It's sort of like when I was a kid and I saved UPC symbols from 10 G.I. Joe (A Real American Hero!) action figures so I could send away for the special Sergeant Slaughter figure, and I was all excited but then I had to wait 4 to 6 weeks for delivery and it was the longest fucking 4 to 6 weeks of my life. It was worth it, though, 'cuz Sergeant Slaughter kicked all kinds of Cobra (The Enemy!) ass.*

I want my new toy to be here now. Why isn't it here now? Why why why? Damn it!


* Actually, in retrospect, Sgt. Slaughter was pretty lame - why would a WWF wrestler be a G.I. Joe? Still, not as lame as the time they did a special "Refrigerator" Perry G.I. Joe figure.

Maturismo

One day, when they inevitably get around to creating the Mount Rushmore of sci-fi authors, the first three slots would almost doubtlessly go to Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury and Robert Heinlein. There would be room for discussion, of course, especially for that third slot. And then the debate would rage about who Honoree #4 would be. My choice? Ursula K. LeGuin. She represents the leading edge of the enormous wave of female authors who would follow her in the field, to begin with. She's brilliant, eminently readable, prolific. Her Earthsea series is great reading. The Left Hand of Darkness is a mind-blowing piece of science fiction. And she's a tireless advocate for sci-fi and fantasy as literature.

Recently, she published this piece in The New Statesman.

In it, she coins a terrific new word - maturismo, "for the anxious savagery of the intellectual who thinks his adulthood has been impugned." There is a class of snobbish intellectual out there who assumes that nothing can be simultaneously fantastic and meaningful to adults. They write off genre fiction, most especially science fiction and fantasy, as trash, the intellectual equivalent of cotton candy. They then find excuses to include fantasy on their Lists of Important Books and write off the fantastic elements as incidental - The Iliad and the Oddyssey are important in the historical development of Western literature, and the ancient Greeks were all primitive and such and didn't know any better. Gulliver's Travels is important as satire, and the fantasy parts are an annoying necessity of the allegory.

Yeah, right.

There can be depth and meaning in genre fiction, just as mainstream literary fiction can be shallow, boring and pretentious. Today, Em's mom noted that she finds new layers of meaning in Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game every time she teaches it to her middle schoolers. In my opinion his sequel, Speaker for the Dead, is even better.

Science fiction and fantasy are uniquely equipped over any other literary style, genre or technique to deal with how humans respond to The Unknown and to The Other. They can speak to our history as well as our future. They can deal with big ideas like God, Death and Fate. I love these genres because they are limitless. Where else in the literary world is there such breadth and depth? Where else can an author explore literally any idea in any way? Harold Bloom would deny it, but the meaning and profundity are there whether he likes it or not.

All that, plus Conan of Cimmerria halving his foes with his mighty blade...what's not to love?

It's a Man, Baby!

Look, all I'm sayin' is, have you ever noticed that Matt Damon and Hillary Swank have never done a movie together?

Separated at birth? Maybe.

Me, I say Matt Damon is a three-time Oscar winner who owns a wig and two wardrobes.

Nerd Year's Resolutions

For 2007, I resolve to be a better nerd. Therefore:

I resolve to watch old-school Star Trek reruns whenever possible.

I resolve to give my D&D players something more interesting to do than fight yet another band of Orcs.

I resolve not to bitch too much about Spider-Man 3, no matter how much it sucks.

I resolve to catch up on reading the nerdy essentials I've been meaning to get around to for years, the Arthur C. Clarke, the Kim Stanley Robinson, the Robert Heinlein, and not spend all the time I could be doing that rereading "Watchmen" and old Batman comics.

I resolve to incorporate at least 15% more "Simpsons" references into my daily conversation.

I resolve not to spend September and October getting needlessly excited about the Denver Broncos' Super Bowl chances, and instead skip directly to the inevitable jaded letdown that usually accompanies November and December.

I resolve to get one o' them Wiis or XBoxes or PlayStations or whatever that the nerds are all excited about these days. Or not.

I resolve to wear more humorous t-shirts.*

I resolve to determine once and for all whether the Jedi Knights could beat the Green Lantern Corps in an all-out fight.

I resolve to get a new pair of Chuck Taylors and wear them until they are little more than a loosely connected string of shoe molecules.

I resolve to be prolific in the creation of webcomics, hilarious cartoons for YouTube distribution, snarky blog entries, and other such things associated with the modern, well-connected nerd.

I resolve to see at least one embarrassingly, horrifyingly nerdy movie in a theater this summer, whatever this year's equivalent of Alien vs. Predator might be.** If there's more than one to see, so much the better.

I resolve to spend many, many hours playing complex boardgames with rulebooks longer than an average Victor Hugo novel.

I resolve to build a functioning trebuchet at my friend's cabin this summer.

I resolve to learn the ancient art of Tae Kwan Leap. Boot to the head!

I resolve, in short, to be the kind of nerd that makes other nerds proud to be nerds. May 2007 be a prosperous, happy and nerdy year for whatever you, reader, choose to geek out about.



* You are free to interpret this as either a resolution to wear a greater number of humorous t-shirts, or as a resolution to wear t-shirts which are more humorous than those I wear now.

** As of this writing, I'm fairly convinced that this movie is Live Free or Die Hard, but we've got a ways to go until the summer.

Indiana Jones and the [Insert Your Own Geriatric Joke Here]

So George Lucas has announced that Indy 4 is set to begin filming next year. I can't help it - I'm excited about it. There's a lot of nerds out there convinced sight unseen that it will suck, and who can blame them? After the general suckitude of the Star Wars "Special Editions" and prequels, everyone's understandably a little gun-shy about George Lucas ressurrecting old franchises. "It's going to be fantastic," Lucas said. "It's going to be the best one yet." Fair enough, but I think he said the same thing about Attack of the Clones, didn't he?

Still, I can't help it. I can't wait to see this movie. Hell, I can't wait to see the trailer for this movie. Yes, I'm a big enough nerd that just sitting in a theater next Xmastime, watching the trailers and hearing the "Raiders March" is going to give me goosebumps. Can't help it. It comes with the territory of nerd-dom. This is the sort of thing that gets us excited. I'll admit it - I'm one of those nerds who paid good money to see the Freddie Prinze Jr. sci-fi/videogame epic Wing Commander just to see the Episode I teaser trailer. And that's not even the lowest I've sunk just to see a trailer.*

Of course, the trailer will be fun and make the movie look great. It's the movie itself, of course, that will be the real event. And I just don't think I can even describe the enormous goofy grin that will surely be on my face as the Paramount Logo dissolves into some other sort of mountain in the actual movie. Of course, I had just the same enormous goofy grin on my face back in 1999 when "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away..." appeared on-screen at the beginning of Episode I, and look how that turned out.

Still, "Hopes High, Expectations Low," that's my motto. I hope it's great, every bit the equal of Raiders, or at the very least the equal of Last Crusade, and I'm excited about seeing it based on my hopes. But I don't expect much from it at all. If it meets my hopes, great. If it meets my expectations, too bad, but at least I'm not disappointed.



* To just what depths I've sunk, I don't think I can even admit.

Cat/Bird Seat

After several visits to my parents' house, the Kitties are quite comfortable there. And their favorite pastime while visiting is watching and/or terrorizing my Mom's pet cockatiel, Rosie. Rosie seems unperturbed by this.

Again? Do We Have To?

As if last week's blizzard wasn't enough, we're getting dumped on again.

We're just not used to this. This isn't Chicago. This isn't Buffalo. This is Denver, where the snow from the last storm is supposed to be melted away by the time the next storm hits. I'm pretty sure that's in the City Charter. But no, there's still two feet of snow on the lawn and giant piles along the barely-plowed streets. And now we're getting more.

This sucks.

It's another morning of TV news morons babbling about the same three topics over and over again - traffic, the airport and the actual weather report. They go to their reporters out in the field and ask, "Steve, what's it like out there?" Just once, I'd love to see one of the reporters reply what we're all thinking: "What's it like out here? Anne, you have a lot of damn gall asking me what it's like out here when you can see me on your monitor there in the nice warm studio. I'll tell you what it's like out here: it's fucking miserable, Anne. It's 22 degrees and it's snowing goddamn sideways. When the news director finally decides he doesn't need me to stand out here by the highway to inform the folks at home that, surprise, surprise, it's still fucking snowing out here, I'm coming back to the studio and I'm going to strangle you. Back to you, Anne." But instead, they chuckle and make inane jokes just like they always do.

Well, fuck it. I'm going back to bed. Wake me in May.

Digging Out

Yesterday, as the snow was dumping on us, we didn't do much. Mostly we spent the day sitting on the couch, watching movies, eating popcorn and drinking mulled wine. It was a nice way to while away a snowy day, overall, but the lack of activity left us both feeling like slugs by the time we went to bed.

This morning, the snowfall was easing up. As we finished our breakfast and I drank my coffee, Em looked out the window and said, "Well, Jim's out there shoveling." And so he was. Our neighbor was hard at work, clearing off his sidewalks. I watched him for a few minutes, sipping coffee, and I started feeling lazy. What could I do?


Of course I bundled up, waded through the snow to the toolshed, retrieved the snow shovel, and started digging. After a while, Em came out to do some digging her own self. In a couple of hours or so, we had cleared two feet of snow off the sidewalks and walkways all around the house. It was cold out there, but it was hard work and I was shedding layers fairly quickly. I felt like I made up for yesterday's lack of activity and then some. After that, we bundled up again and took a much-more-arduous-than-usual walk to the grocery store. We thought we were getting eggs for tomorrow's breakfast, but as it turned out, there wasn't a single egg left in the store, so we got pancake mix instead.



And, of course, between the shoveling and the supply run, Em paused to make a snow angel.

Billions and Billions

I would be a very remiss Great Big Nerd, indeed, if I did not participate in the Carl Sagan Memorial Blog-a-thon. Ten years ago today, 20 December 1996, Carl Sagan died. He was only 62.

Among my earliest TV memories, alongside the cartoons and the "Sesame Street" and the "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood," there is "Cosmos." Obviously, I was very small and wouldn't have watched it on my own, but my Dad was a fan. I remember bits and pieces - some interesting visuals and the distinctive music, mostly.

My strongest association with Sagan is with the movie Contact, based on his novel. Okay, so Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey have all the chemistry of a couple of mannequins. But it's one of the few sci-fi movies I can think of that's really about ideas rather than bug-eyed monsters and evil robots.

I'm also a big fan of his 1977 book The Dragons of Eden - Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence. It's perhaps a bit dated nearly thirty years later, but it remains a fascinating read. There's all kinds of great stuff in it about how and why human beings are intelligent, the capacity for language in the great apes, the origins of the myth of Eden, mammals' ancient rivalry with reptiles, and much, much more. And he's quite capable of an evocative turn of phrase: "Late at night," he writes in Chapter 6, about the function of dreaming, "when it is very still and the obligatory daily dreams have been dreamt, the gazelles and the dragons begin to stir."

If there's a silver lining in Sagan's death, it is that he did not live to see the dreadful state of reason in America today. Sagan would have been more appalled than anyone to hear the President of the United States advocating for the teaching of "intelligent design" in the science classroom. He would have been horrified by the administration's - and the public's - disregard for science on the subjects of stem cell research and climate change. He would have been disgusted by the overwhelming and increasing influence of religion on public policy.

Sagan was, above all, a believer in the power of reason and rational thinking. He had no tolerance for talk of mysticism, astrology, ESP, UFOs, or anything else that couldnt' be demonstrated or tested. He believed in the potential of humanity to achieve anything, but feared that we might well blow ourselves up before we got there. In short, Carl Sagan was exactly the kind of thinker the world desperately needs more of today.

Plus, he could rock the turtleneck-and-blazer combo like nobody's business.

Grr. Arrgh.

Now that I'm out of class for a while, my creative energies can be directed back at my long-in-the-works webcomic. It's going to be a while before it's actually up and running, but in the meantime, here's a little sneak peak for yez.

And Then We Retired to the Drawing Room for Coffee, Brandy and Cigars

We had people over for dinner tonight.

Sometimes, my parents come down for dinner, which is nice. But tonight, it was some of our very best friends, Julie, Chris and Amber, which is even better. My parents are great, and always good dinner company. But it's always better having friends over, in my opinion. One's parents are a family obligation. Friends are a different matter. Having friends for dinner has a way of making me feel very grown-up. Planning what to cook, what wine to serve, what to serve for dessert is always a pleasure. The cooking is always fun, too - how can I be unhappy or stressed with a chance to show off my mad kitchen skillz? It's kind of silly, but it's one of the only times I really feel like an Adult-with-a-capital-"A".

Tonight it was chicken tortilla soup (my own recipe, natch) and cornbread - perfect for a day when the weather finally turned back into typical, frosty December weather after a week of 60-degree days. Em made two kinds of Christmas cookies for dessert - Austrian Chocolate Balls and Mexican Wedding Cakes. Both delicious. Much wine was drunk. Matters both weighty and frivolous were discussed. I earned props for my soup, and far too many cookies were consumed.

The guests are gone and the music has been turned off. It feels a little strange to have the house suddenly be so quiet after an evening of noise.

All in all, I must say, the post-dinner-party relaxation time is one of the most perfect, simple and uncomplicated feelings of contentment I know.

Puttin' on the Ritz

A moment of silence, please, for the late, great Peter Boyle, who died yesterday at the age of 71.

Most people probably know him from his work on Everybody Loves Raymond. My limited experience with that show suggests that Boyle was far and away the best, funniest thing it had going. Still, I really couldn't care less about Raymond. Ray Romano's voice is like fingernails on a chalkboard.

Anyway, Peter Boyle is eternally worth remembering for his part in my personal choice for Funniest Movie of All Time, Young Frankenstein.

It's an absolute Murderer's Row of a cast: the immortal Gene Wilder, Terri Garr, Marty Feldman, Cloris Leachman, Madeline Kahn, and Boyle more than holds his own. One might say, "How hard can it be playing Frankenstein's Monster?" I donno, but I think that if you replace Peter Boyle in that role, you lose something vital. He speaks volumes with a single grunt. His timing and facial expressions are dead-on. Check out the scene between Boyle and Gene Hackman as the Blind Hermit. Hackman is a great actor overall, and underrated as a comic actor, and he's very funny in the scene. But Boyle's acting is what makes the scene the funniest thing in the Funniest Movie of All Time. His constantly thwarted anticipation and ultimate (quite literal) slow burn are just brilliant. And he's equally great in the "Puttin' on the Ritz" scene - how many actors can really dance in a way that is at once stiff and lumbering and yet strangely graceful?

He was also memorable as the Wizard in Taxi Driver, and as the psychic Clyde Bruckman in one of the great X-Files episodes, "Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose."

And, according to his IMDB trivia page, he spent time as a monk before becoming an actor, and John Lennon was his best man at his wedding. So that's pretty good, right?

Angsty Birthday!

As you might guess from Google's wikid cool Dec. 12 logo, today is Edvard Munch's birthday. I don't have much to say about it, I just thought the Google logo was neat.

So if you're a college kid living in a shitty basement apartment, pause between bingers today to look up at that print of "The Scream" that's hanging on the wall between the Che Guevara and Bob Marley posters and give a mental salute to Norway's greatest artist, the Godfather of Expressionism, Edvard Munch, whose 143rd birthday it is.

Stupid, Stupid Rat Creatures! Shazam!

I've recently discovered another comics pro blog, written by the great Jeff Smith. For those of you not familiar (which, I assume, is all of you), Jeff Smith is the creator of one of the all-time great comics, Bone. Bone is coming out these days in new colorized editions, which are kind of cool, but I like the old-school b&w better.

Anyway, I've learned that Jeff Smith is working on a Captain Marvel miniseries for DC. This is very, very, very, very, very exciting news. This means that one of my very favorite comics artists is writing and drawing my very favorite superhero.

Yes, that's right. Captain Marvel. The Greatest Superhero Ever. And, since you asked, I'll gladly tell you why.

Billy Batson, poor orphan boy, is chosen by the great wizard Shazam as his champion. When Billy says the wizard's name, he transforms into Captain Marvel, the World's Mightiest Mortal. He has the wisdom of Solomon, the strength of Hercules, the courage of Achilles, the power of Zeus, the stamina of Atlas and the speed of Mercury. Yes, sharp-eyed readers, the names of those mythological figures do, indeed, spell out SHAZAM.

Anyway, the concept of the superhero is at heart a power fantasy. Clark Kent, Bruce Wayne, Peter Parker...all wimps and nerds, ignored by women and tormented by bullies, until they put on a silly costume, becoming powerful and above such petty concerns. Captain Marvel is the purest distillation of this - his transformation is literal, not just figurative. He truly transforms from being insignificant and completely vulnerable to the hero of millions and all-powerful. He flies, he's super-strong, he's bulletproof.

Captain Marvel is full of joyous comic book silliness - his enemies include Black Adam, the requisite "evil twin," Dr. Sivana, maddest of mad scientists, and Mr. Mind, master of the Monster Society of Evil and tiny green worm. One of his best friends is Mr. Talky Tawny, an anthropomorphic, talking tiger. There is much goofiness. Silliness abounds.

A lot of modern nerds can't get into Captain Marvel because of the silliness. I don't get it. Superheroes are inherently silly. Batman is the world's greatest detective, a master of dozens of fighting forms, and carts a teenage boy around with him to help him fight crime. The X-Men are described as "the next stage of human evolution," which apparently involves being able to shoot laser beams out of their eyes, mastery over elemental forces of nature like the weather and magnetism. A pair of glasses prevents anyone from realizing that Clark Kent and Superman are the same person. Apparently, all of this is far more believable and less silly than a wizard, a mad scientist and a talking tiger.

Anyone who says different is wrong. Captain Marvel kicks giant ass.

Shazam!

Things I Made in Art Class

This is a Surrealist Self-Portrait, created with PhotoShop. It is meant to reflect my preoccupation with my rapidly approaching 30th birthdy.



Here we have the Neo-Dada Social Commentary piece, also done in PhotoShop. It's about, like, you know, drugs and stuff, and how things that are called "drugs" are only called that because they're illegal, whereas there's plenty of things out there that are addictive and/or mind-altering that are perfectly legal.



Finally, the Expressionistic Still Life, created using Corel Painter. The assignment was to create an image that reflected a particular emotional state. See if you can guess what I was going for.

Lies Your Parents Told You

Many of us, if not most of us, spent the earliest years of our lives believing a big fat lie. You know what I'm talking about, right? The Fat Man. Pere Noel. Sinterklaas. Father Christmas. Jolly Ol' Saint Nick.

I realized there was no Santa the year my Mom "just happened to have the right battery" required for Snake Mountain, which Santa had brought for me. But everyone's got a story like that, right? Everybody remembers the moment of realization.

Think about any other lie your parents may have told you for a moment. Think about learning the truth behind it - "The mailman is your real father." If your parents told you a lie that big, you resent it, right? You're still angry about it, aren't you?

But do you know anyone who resents their parents for lying to them about Santa Claus? It's weird, isn't it? Your parents tell you a bald-faced lie for years, for no real reason other than to get you to "be good." But nobody's ever angry about it. We all look back at this great deception and laugh about it.

I'm not saying I'm angry or resentful. I just find it damned odd, that's all.

Just for EEK

Some San Francisco sidewalk art we thought you'd enjoy...

Joyful and Triumphant

The dreaded month of December has arrived, and with it...

Well, no, not "with it," as they've been blabbing about Christmas since mid-October on the teevee.

But now that it's actually Xmastime, I don't find all the Xmas stuff nearly so offensive. Still, there are things that get to me. The advertising, mostly. If I ever in real life actually witness some insufferable douchebag present his wife with a giant-bow-betopped Lexus, I won't be able to stop myself from punching him.

It's funny - you make a single ill-tempered comment about the holiday, and everybody's calling you a Scrooge or a Grinch. But both the esteemed Mr. Dickens and the good Doctor who created those iconic holiday figures were commenting about Christmas becoming meaningless and over-comercialized. In 1843, Dickens felt Christmas was over-commercialized. I can't imagine what he'd think were he alive today.*

Of course, even learning a Heartwarming Lesson About the True Meaning of Christmas has become cliche. Everyone from Charlie Brown to Bill Murray to Arnold Schwarzenegger has learned a Heartwarming Lesson About the True Meaning of Christmas. I'm sure that Mattew Broderick and Danny DeVito will learn some Heartwarming Lessons about the True Meaning of Christmas in this year's Deck the Halls, as will Lewis Black, The Guy Who Played Fez, The Kid Who Plays Chris on "Everybody Hates Chris" and the rest of the cast of Unacompanied Minors (which, while it looks pretty awful does at least have the merit of not being lazily named after a line in a familiar Christmas carol, and was directed by Paul "Freaks & Geeks" Feig, so it can't be all bad).

Another thing that gets to me is the music. There's very little good Christmas music in the world. A good chunk of it is on the Xmas mixes that Eek has sent out over the years. A bit of Dean Martin or Frank Sinatra or Der Bingle singing "Jingle Bells" or somesuch is okay (I know it is in itself kind of trite at this point, but the Crosby/Bowie Xmas duet where Bing croons out "Little Drummer Boy" while Bowie sings "Peace on Earth" is, in fact, wikid cool). Can't go wrong with Vince Guaraldi's "Charlie Brown Christmas" stuff, either. The rest of it? Yecch. I could go the rest of my life without hearing Mariah fucking Carey warble her way through "Santa, Baby" or do that horrifying warbly/belty vibrato-ish thing she does where she makes that sound that's like a Tarzan yell if Tarzan was a castrato that she thinks proves what a great singer she is, which is in pretty much all of her songs, but especially in that pinnacle of Xmas music craptacularity, "All I Want For Christmas Is You." Or "Wonderful Christmastime." Or that crappy one where there's a pretty bad children's choir singing, "Don't you wish it could be Christmas every day?" Or "Silver Bells." Maybe my least favorite is "Jingle Bell Rock." Unless it's "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree."

My parents, posessors of the lamest musical taste ever, are champions of awful Christmas music. Among the discs that get heavy rotation in their house every December is Jimmy Buffet's Xmas album, which features a variety of skull-crushingly awful tunes, not worst of which is Buffet's terrible rendition of John Lennon's "Merry Christmas (War is Over)." Worse than that, they own and love Kenny G's Xmas album. Burned into my memory is a Christmas Eve where my Dad turned off a Coltrane album my brother was playing in order to play Kenny G's psuedo-jazz stylings of "Winter Wonderland." Ugh.

Today, I went out and acquired some real, worthwhile Christmas music. Oddly, even though I'm not even remotely a Christian, it's the old-school really religious stuff that I really dig the most. Handel's Messiah, Bach's Christmas Oratorio...that's where it's at, man. What I really like about it is that it really is, to borrow a phrase, joyful and triumphant. It's not about making a buck like so much modern Christmas music (although Handel was, in fact, quite wealthy when he died, largely based on the success of the Messiah). It was music that was created with feeling and passion. It is a musical expression of the sheer joy of the birth of the savior. Like I said, funny, because I couldn't really care less ultimately about the birth of the savior. But, unlike a baffling number of people out there who can't wait for "Now That's What I Call Christmas! Vol. 47," I respond much more strongly to something with real meaning than to yet another idiotic rendition of "Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer."



* After, "I hope someone lets me out of this coffin," of course.

Will it Be You?

Hey, do you like Chick tracts? What am I asking, of course you do. Who doesn't love Chick tracts? The terrible art, the hilariously wooden dialogue, the smug-yet-totally-inept proselytizing, people who say "Haw Haw" a lot, the rampant bigotry against basically anyone who's not a born-again Christian, though with special venom reserved for Jews, Mormons, Catholics and Muslims...what's not to love? Chick tracts are to comics as those bizarre Left Behind books are to actual novels.

And here is the best Chick tract ever.

Except, it's not really a Chick tract, but a spot-on parody that's every bit as funny as anything Jack Chick ever produced, except this one's funny on purpose. Enjoy.

With Guns. And Knives. They're Fighting For Their Lives...

An interesting credit appears on the screen, and it makes me chuckle.

"What made you laugh?" Emily whispers.

"That's the first time the it's said 'Based upon the novel by Ian Fleming' in the credits of a James Bond movie in a long, long time," I reply.

The main title theme to Casino Royale, "You Know My Name," sung by Chris Cornell, late of Soundgarden, just blows. Terrible. Up there (down there?) with Tina Turner's GoldenEye and Gladys Knight's License to Kill. Happily, that's about the only thing in this movie that's not fucking awesome.

One of the best things about the movie is that the credit that made me laugh is no joke. Casino Royale follows Fleming's novel quite closely, hearkening back to the early days of Dr. No and From Russia With Love, before the writers and producers started veering wildly away from the plots of the books and adding absurdity on top of absurdity. It's been modernized, of course - the villain, Le Chiffre, is a banker for terrorist organizations instead of Communist fifth-columnists, of course. Plenty of action has been added, too, as Fleming's book doesn't feature a whole lot of that trait.

And action, it turns out, is something for which Daniel Craig is well-suited. He makes a very muscular Bond in both a literal and figurative sense. Best since Connery? No doubt. He has the right combination of physicality, forceful personality and intelligence to make the character hit all the right notes. There's an on-foot chase early on that's one of the best chase sequences I've ever seen in a movie.

The movie does drag a bit in the middle. It proves my long-held belief that one of the most boring things a human can do is watch other people play poker. Unlike the supreme boredom of watching the World Series of Poker on ESPN, at least in the movie there's an actual plot that I was invested in. Also, there are some nice breaks in the poker sequences for Bond to go get in fights and kill people.

There's not a whole ton of humor, but that's a good thing. The over-the-top silliness and the long-cliche "I think he got the point" post-killing-somebody one-liners are gone. There is just enough, and they wisely reserve the funniest moment in the movie as comic relief in an otherwise brutal and highly disturbing torture sequence.

QIR wanted to sit through the end credits in order to see where the movie had been filmed. I didn't mind. Instead of the crappy theme song or some new techno-y remix, they were playing the classic Monty Norman electric guitar and orchestra James Bond theme. Sweet.

Thanks

Thanks to the super-heroes, whose tireless efforts protect us all from the nefarious plans of Lex Luthor, Dr. Doom, the Red Skull and their ilk.

Thanks to the Illuminati, the Freemasons and the Shadow Government, for controlling the entire world so we don't have to.

Thanks to the professional wrestlers, whose high-flying acrobatics, absurdist soap-operatic shenanigans and somewhat hushed-up steroid abuse entertain us all in such a delightfully lowbrow way.

Thanks to James Tiberius Kirk, for rocking the two-fisted-club punch and being a general Intergalactic Lothario for all these years.

Thanks to the Denver Broncos Barrel Man, for being a fat old man so devoted to a professional football franchise that he allows himself to be seen in public wearing an orange barrel, a Stetson hat and cowboy boots.

Thanks to Masi Oka for being thoroughly charming and entertaining each week as Hiro Nakamura on Heroes.

Thanks to the folks at Ocean Spray for inventing the idiotic word "Craisins" because they surmise that the average American consumer is too dumb to understand what "dried cranberries" are.

Thanks to Trey Parker and Matt Stone for continuing to create snarky, insanely juvenile humor with a light patina of social comentary.

Thanks to Neil Gaiman, just for being himself.

Thanks to the potheads of the state of Colorado, for failing to pass pot-legalization initiative Amendment 44 in such a hilariously spectacular/spectacularly hilarious way, and for their reaction to to its inevitable failure being even more hilarious.

Thanks to monkeys, for flinging their poo and being hilarious.

Thanks to reruns of Seinfeld and the early seasons of Friends for proving to us all that the fashion trends of the '90s are no less silly than those of the '70s or '80s, just silly in a different way.

Thanks to meth-buying, gay-prostitute-hiring Pastor Ted Haggard for being a source of absolutely delightful and comical schadenfreude.

And finally, as my lovely Thanksgiving Day winds down, a big, heartfelt thanks to turkeys, for being so, so delicious.

Good night, and good luck. And happy Thanksgiving.

Headwear, Liver Damage, Lung Damage

Last night, I wore a fez, I drank exotic liquor, I smoked strawberry and mint flavored tobacco in a hookah.

Many thanks to Leah and Simon for a lovely evening of not exactly debauchery, but good times, good booze and one of the more interesting smoking experiences I've had. Even the finest cigar or bowl of pipe tobacco has a tendency to leave a kind of assy taste in one's mouth afterward. Smoking a hookah is somewhat like smoking a bong, only moreso and with tobacco rather than weed. Smooth, cool, mellow smoke, and no assy aftertaste. That would be the slogan if I were an adman working on a big hookah campaign.

The promised Casino Royale review is coming when I manage to get around to seeing it - maybe today, maybe tomorrow.

Men want him. Women want to be him.

Tomorrow, there's going to be a new James Bond movie. Because I'm as nerdy a nerd who ever nerded, this is very exciting to me. I think that all the naysayers who are up in arms about how much Daniel Craig is going to suck are way wrong. They clearly haven't seen Layer Cake, in which Craig proves himself to have the chops to play a good 007. Simon, the Boy of A Girl & A Boy, predicts that Craig will be the Best...Bond...Ever... amongst a lengthy and hilarious discussion of the making of Honey Martinis. Of course, he predicts that Craig will steal the title from Timothy Dalton, so maybe take his statements with a grain of salt.

Bonds in order from best to worst - Sean Connery (natch), Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan (points subtracted for being named Pierce), George Lazenby, Roger Moore.

Seriously, anyone who says they think Roger Moore is the best Bond is simply not to be trusted. That dude just flat-out sucked. The Spy Who Loved Me is pretty good, but that has more to do with cool villains, the strong female lead and a fucking Lotus that turns into a submarine.

My controversial choice for best Bond movie? On Her Majesty's Secret Service. Lazenby's weak, but everything around him is great. Blofeld's mountaintop hideout, Diana Rigg, the first-and-still-the-best ski chase, and the cherry on top that is a fistfight on a bobsled at the end.

Worst Bond movie: A View to a Kill. San Francisco is a beautiful location, one of the most photogenic cities in the world. And that's about all this movie has going for it. Moore is old and bored, that "Charlie's Angels" chick is just terrible, Christopher Walken is weird and creepy as usual but never terribly entertaining.

I'll be back with more Bondy goodness next time I post (Tomorrow night, maybe, more likely Sunday or Monday) with a full nerdy-ass-nerd review of Casino Royale.

Pitagora Suicchi

Dude, Japanese TV is cool.

The video is pretty long, so don't feel obligated to watch all of it, but it's pretty amusing.

For the final project in my 3D Design class, I've got to make a Rube Goldberg machine that makes a mark of some sort on a piece of paper. It can't involve fire, hazardous materials or live animals. It has to have some sort of overall visual theme. The process has to be repeatable in a relatively short amount of time. Other than that, the requirements for the project are pretty wide-open.

So...readers, any brilliant ideas? If I could just re-create the Breakfast Cooker from Pee-wee's Big Adventure, I would. But I can't, so I'm looking for inspiration from all sources. Anyone?

Guatemala Schmolla

Katherine was having a lousy time at the Marine Corps Ball...


Until Matt showed up and saved the day!

Holla!

Walk-and-Talk to be Replaced by Just Walk

I've tried. I've watched every episode so far. The first one was good enough to keep me interested. I've watched the rest hoping it would at least get back to that level, if not better. No such luck. I've officially given up on "Studio 60."

I came to a few realizations last night while watching this show.

1. There's really no possible subject matter for a TV show more boring than studio politics. On Sorkin's previous (and highly, highly superior) "backstage" show, "SportsNight," there was the occasional subplot about, "The big bosses want this and that," but mostly the show was about the people working on the show-within-a-show and the various ways they related with one another. "Studio 60" is just constant, unending waves of "the guy from 'Wings' wants this, Chandler Bing and Whatsisname from 'West Wing' don't want to do it, and Whatsername Who Can't Act makes a compromise." It never ends, and it's like watching paint dry, only it's on television, so you don't even get the mild high from the fumes.

2. The bits and pieces of comedy sketches we see from the show-within-a-show? Not even remotely funny. Smug, sarcastic, trying way too hard to be funny? Yes, all of these things. But actually make-you-laugh funny? Nope. Sorkin can do funny - "SportsNight" was, in its day, one of the funniest shows on TV. But he's not doing it here...

3. Following on that, one of the main reasons it's never funny: Too much Jesus. The half of the show that doesn't revolve around boring-as-fuck studio/network politics revolves around Chandler Bing writing sketches that mock Christianity, and somebody, usually but not always That One Blonde Chick Whose Character is a Christian But Not One of the Bad Ones, gets in a snit and says, "You're mocking the deeply-held beliefs of millions of people!" I think Sorkin just wants to see how many weeks in a row he can include the same line in a show, because with little variation, it seems to be there every week. Last night, special guest star John Goodman got to say it.

And the thing is, they're right. If Observation #2 weren't true, it would be a different story. That is to say, if we were seeing them mock Christians and Christianity in a funny way, it would be easier to buy that there's actually an argument worth having there. But as it stands, all they're doing is taking smug, easy cheap shots at Christians and Christianity, and it's stupid and insulting. Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending the hypocritical Jerry Falwells and Ted Haggards of the world, who deserve every cheap shot that gets lobbed at them. But as much as Sorkin tries to disguise it, he seems to be pretty clearly of the opinion that the entire religion and all of its adherents deserve no mercy from his (and his proxy Chandler Bing's) rapier wit.

***

At the other end of the "shows about a not-so-thinly-veiled-standin-for-SNL" spectrum, my not-so-secret Secret Girlfriend Tina Fey's "30 Rock," which I've caught a couple of times now, has been at least entertaining and amusing if not uproariously funny.

Also, "Heroes," about which I was cautiously excited, just rocks, and is getting better and better.

In Which Wolverine and Batman are Total Dicks to One Another

Went to see The Prestige last night, and I dug it quite a lot. Batman and Wolverine are both excellent, Michael Caine is as good as ever, Scarlett Johannsen is quite good in a small role and, of course, quite lovely to behold. It's also nice to see David Bowie in a movie and not have to spend two hours unable to look away from his mule knuckle. Also nice to see Andy Serkis getting work from someone besides Peter Jackson. The plot turned kind of science-fictiony partway through, which bothered Emily, but did not bother me. Some aspects of the inevitable surprise ending are a bit Shyamalanian - kind of forced and meant to be surprising but ultimately predictable. Still, it's a fairly minor flaw in an overall outstanding movie.

It's kind of difficult to write much about this movie because it's similar in so many ways to The Illusionist. A lot of the ideas and themes in both movies are very similar. Both movies even used Ricky Jay as a technical advisor (Jay even has a small role as the magician that both Batman and Wolverine work for early on in The Prestige). A lot of what I might write about this movie, I already wrote a month ago. And this isn't like comparing Deep Impact (kinda dopey and forgetable) with Armageddon (willfully stupid and almost insultingly bad), as both of these magician movies are quite good. The key difference is that The Illusionist is a love story and The Prestige is a hate story. It's difficult to pick sides in The Prestige, as neither of the leads is terribly sympathetic. Not only are Wolverine and Batman, as noted in the title, total dicks to one another, but they're also total dicks to pretty much everyone around them, too. Obsession is a key element in both movies - but where Eisenheim is obsessed with saving his true love in The Illusionist, here Wolverine and Batman are obsessed with destroying each other. Both movies have similar themes, but take them in interestingly different directions.

The Wolverine/Batman pairing, as you can probably tell, amuses me to no end. It's almost as good as the 1994 romantic comedy Speechless, in which Batman (Michael Keaton) and Superman (Christopher Reeve) compete for the affections of Geena Davis.

Wolverine is a busy boy these days. We also saw the trailer for The Fountain, starring Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz, which looks fucking awesome. Also the trailer for Mel Gibson's Apocalypto, which looks very strange but also potentially pretty good.

A Rag-Tag Fugitive Fleet

How often is the remake as good as the original? Almost never.

How often is the remake actually better than the original? Maybe one in a million.

How often is the remake leaps and bounds beyond the original, a complete improvement in pretty much every way? I can think of exactly one example.

My brother and I were huge "Battlestar Galactica" fans when we were kids. But then, we were kids, and just about anything with spaceships and rayguns and evil robots is cool as hell when you're a five-year-old boy. The original "Battlestar Galactica" was cheesey as hell, featuring Ben Cartwright and Faceman from "The A-Team" in velour spacesuits doing battle with guys in chintzy robot costumes. Also, there was a cute kid with a robotic dog.

I always thought the basic story concept was interesting, and could be done well. Turns out I was right.

We're partway through season "2.5" of the new "Galactica" on DVD, and every episode just blows my mind. A lot of nerds are saying it's the best sci-fi TV show ever, and I'm inclined to agree. My love for "Star Trek" in both Classic and Next Generation varieties knows no bounds, but "Galactica" is at least the equal of those shows. Great characters played by great actors, compelling plots, just the right amount of action...what's not to love? Toss in a bit of eye candy for men (Katee Sackhoff is just wikid, wikid hot) and for women ('cuz I know craggy, pock-marked Edward James Olmos just drives the ladies wild), and you've got a great show.

To call it the best sci-fi show is to damn with faint praise. It still ghettoizes the show, lumping it in with crap like "Stargate" and the last couple of "Star Trek" spinoffs. "Battlestar Galactica" is as good as anything on TV right now.

White People Food

We arrive home from a couple of days away, hungry but unwilling to go to the grocery store. I've just been driving for three hours; Emily spent most of the day working. Neither of us has much creative energy. Desperate times call for desperate measures. We must make do with what is in the house.

The green beens are rotten. The bread is moldy. There is some chicken, but not enough to make a meal for two. I gather what I can, and set to work.

Forty-five minutes later, I present Emily with what I proudly proclaim to be, "the Whitest meal ever served that doesn't actually involve Wonder Bread or Velveeta." I've browned a bit of plain ground turkey with diced peppers and onions and mixed it with mac-n-cheese. On the side, owing to a shocking lack of edible vegetables, I'm serving the best I could come up with, glazed carrots. It's all mitigated somewhat by the fact that it's Annie's organic shells and cheese rather than the ever-reliable bluebox Kraft Dinner. Moreso by the fact that, not hampered by the standard whitebread middle-America aversion to seasonings more exotic than black pepper, I've actually managed to make a fairly tasty rendition of White People Food.

Still, eating it makes me feel like Emily and I should watch some "CSI," then read a few pages of a John Grisham or Danielle Steele novel before settling down for the night in Pleasantville-style twin beds, finally lulling ourselves to sleep with comforting thoughts of the Republican party defending Traditional American Values and protecting us from the illegal immigrants and the gays...

Right. Curried red lentils and naan for dinner this weekend, then...

An Idiot, I Suppose

Sigh.

It just never ends.

Gene Yang's comic book American Born Chinese has been praised far and wide. In fact, it's been nominated for a National Book Award. Tony Long at Wired News weighs in with a well-informed opinion that this is a bad thing. Just how well-informed is his opinion? Well, he tells us, "I have not read this particular 'novel' but I'm familiar with the genre so I'm going to go out on a limb here." That's a good way to establish some credibility. In the same vein, I haven't seen the "movie" The Wind that Shakes the Barley, but I'm familiar with the genre, so I'm going to go out on a limb and say that it quite obviously did not deserve to win the 2006 Palme d'Or at Cannes.

Though he assures us that, "this is not about denigrating the comic book," Long provides this nugget of brilliance: "comic books should not be nominated for National Book Awards, in any category. That should be reserved for books that are, well, all words." Wow, good thing you're not denigrating comic books, Tony.

But he's not done, of course. He provides further brilliance: "If you've ever tried writing a real novel, you'll know where I'm coming from. To do it, and especially to do it well enough to be nominated for this award, the American equivalent of France's Prix Goncourt or Britain's Booker Prize, is exceedingly difficult." Yes, novel-writing is exceedingly difficult. Writing and drawing a 240-page comic book, though, is as easy as steering a train. Nothin' to it. Requires basically no effort, skill or talent whatsoever.

The guy does, in an idiotic and backhanded fashion, have a somewhat valid point, though. "This is simply to say that, as literature, the comic book does not deserve equal status with real novels, or short stories. It's apples and oranges." His judgement about what sort of status and consideration a comic book "deserves" is not just insulting, it's downright stupid. But trying to compare comics to prose is, indeed fairly useless. Any narrative form can be compared to any other...but comics are comics. They don't nominate movies or plays for National Book Awards, and comics probably shouldn't be nominated for awards intended for prose fiction, either. Not that they don't "deserve" it, just that they're an entirely different art form.

So insulting. "Juvenile literature attracts a lot of first-rate authors. Always has.
Sorry, but no comic book, regardless of how cleverly executed, belongs in that class." I really love the use of the phrase, "cleverly executed" to describe what he supposes is a first-rate comic book, like he was describing a magic trick or a witty remark.

I think Neil Gaiman summed it up best in his response:

I suppose if he builds a time machine he could do something about Maus's 1992 Pulitzer, or Sandman's 1991 World Fantasy Award for Best Short Story, or Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan winning the 2001 Guardian First Book Award, or even Watchmen's appearance on Time's Hundred Best Novels of the 20th Century list. Lacking a Time Machine, it seems a rather silly and antiquated argument, like hearing someone complain that women have the vote or that be-bop music and crooners are turning up in the pop charts.

I like the bit where he says that he hasn't read the comic in question, but he just knows what things like that are like. It's always best to be offended by things you haven't read. That way you keep your mind uncluttered by things that might change it.

The Other Other Other White Meat

This commercial just came on TV...

"It happens every year. Just about the time the Broncos hit the field, the McRib comes back to McDonald's!" Boy, what an exciting event.

I think that of all the disgusting things they serve at McDonald's, the McRib is one of them.

For those not familiar, the McRib is a sandwich comprised of reconstituted meat-like product, shaped vaguely like a rack of ribs slathered in a substance that is not unlike barbecue sauce and topped with diced onions.

It does not escape my notice that they're very vague about what kind of meat the McRib is actually made of. I sampled a McRib once when I was in high school, and I recall not being able to tell just what the meat was. Theoretically, one would suppose that a barbecue sandwich ought to be made of pork. It could, however, be beef. It could be horse. It could be pigeon. Hard to tell, really. And they just don't say. It reminds me of the old myth that the Col. Sanders folks changed over to "KFC" from "Kentucky Fried Chicken" because they couldn't legally call what they serve "chicken" anymore.

At least, I think that's a myth...

Dare To Be Stupid

Show me a nerd who doesn't love Weird Al Yankovic like a fat kid loves cake, and I'll show you someone who's not really a nerd at all. Writer Sam Anderson muses on the pop-cultural significance of Weird Al over at Slate, under a great title: "Troubadork."

And by the way, if you haven't seen "White & Nerdy," you really do need to check it out. Hilarious.

I got my first CD player when I was in 9th grade, and the first two CDs I bought were Queen's Flash Gordon soundtrack and Weird Al's Off the Deep End. That neither of these purchases struck me as even remotely odd should be a good indicator that the title of this blog is quite apt.

Another indicator is the fact that I still occasionally listen to Freddie Mercury and the boys explaining that Flash (Ah-aah!) will save ev'ry one of us. Can't say I still pull the Weird Al CD out of the book at all, though. "Smells Like Nirvana" remains funny and will probably remain so for as long as people are listening to Nirvana. On the other hand, the album's parodies of Milli Vanilli, NKOTB and Gerardo (aka the "Rico Suave" guy) are, like their subjects, interesting but essentially irrelevant pop-cultural fossils, only moreso. Playing "The Right Stuff" or "Baby Don't Forget My Number" at a party might get you a laugh. Playing "The White Stuff" or "Don't Forget My Plumber" at a party will probably just get you strange looks.

That's the tricky part about what Weird Al does, I suppose, along the same lines of something I mentioned in my post about MAD magazine not long ago. Parody is a very of-the-moment art, a delicate balance. You mostly just have to throw everything you can think of up against the wall and see what sticks. If your subject ages like fine wine, then your parody will, too. The rest will age like prison hooch. A parody of Gone With the Wind is still funny and interesting, because Rhett and Scarlett have endured and the movie remains popular nearly seventy years on. A parody of Twister isn't funny or interesting because the movie, only ten years old, is already little more than a curiosity, a cultural relic of the mid-'90s. Similarly, "Smells Like Nirvana" is still relevant because "Smells Like Teen Spirit" is, too, whereas I can't even say "Gerardo" and expect anyone will know who I'm talking about without appending "(aka the 'Rico Suave' guy)," and even then there's some doubt.

In other words, it's a tough job, skewering the pomposity and bombast of modern popular music, but Weird Al's been doing it pretty well for twenty-five years now, from "My Bologna" to "White & Nerdy."

Plus, who else can you name who can fucking ROCK OUT on the accordion?

Here Comes Santa Claus

Jeebus Fucking Christ in a birchbark canoe...

It begins.

I remind you, gentle reader, that it's two weeks until Halloween. And they're already starting to phase out Halloween candy on the store shelves and replace it with Christmas decorations. Remember when nobody even mentioned Christmas until after Thanksgiving? I'm now mere days away from a constant barrage of TV ads telling me that I can get all my Christmas shopping done at JC Penney, that I can only really show her that I love her by buying forty thousand dollars worth of diamonds for Christmas, that I'm a bad person if I'm not buying extravagant Christmas gifts for every single person I know, from my parents to the postman to Aloysius, my fourth cousin twelve times removed who I met once at the family reunion when I was eleven, that I need to stock up on Chex Mix and Cool Whip to make The Holidays extra-special and if I don't, I'm a thoughtless asshole who will RUIN CHRISTMAS FOR THE ENTIRE FAMILY right down to Cousin Aloysius, that Christmas is a special fucking time when special fucking memories are made but only in direct proportion to the amount of money I spend.

As I write this, Sarah McLachlan is on the Tonight Show singing a fucking Christmas song. It's October goddamn 18th. It's happening already, and it's only going to get worse. Two weeks from now, every store and restaurant I go into is going to be playing endless craptacular Christmas music.

I just saw another ad for The Santa Clause 3. The movie is billing itself as "the final chapter in the greatest holiday trilogy of all time!" Quick, name another holiday trilogy!

Yeah, me neither.

This ad was followed, by the way, by an ad for the "Colorado Country Christmas Gift Show, November 3-5 at the Denver Merchandise Mart." Ugh.

The sum total of all this is...well...here it is...

Here it comes...

I hate Christmas.

There's a tiny bit of me that spends the first ten months of each year dreading the last two. This piece of me knows that I'll spend those two months wanting to put a bullet through my TV screen, Elvis-style, that I'm going to be fucking bombarded by holly and mistletoe and Jessica goddamn Simpson warbling her way through "Santa, Baby" every time I step foot out of the house. This piece of me also knows that if I make even the tiniest peep of complaint about any of this, somebody will be right there to call me a Grinch or a Scrooge or something, because it's my patriotic duty as an American to luv luv luv Christmas.

You know what holiday I like? The Fourth of July. It's low-stress. It's fun and there are interesting things going on, parades and fireworks and suchlike, but there's not much advertising associated with it, there's no fucking Fourth of July carols (unless you count the Star-Spangled Banner and the works of John Phillip Sousa), and it's mostly about cheeseburgers and cold beer. What's not to love?

gcxplbz

I've been trying for two hours now to write a post. I've been completely unable to organize my thoughts into anything remotely coherent or interesting. I suppose all of my creative energies have been pouring into the two huge projects I turned in today. So maybe I'll have a resurgence of bloggish creativity soon - stay tuned. For now, I'm fuckin beat, man.

Nakedity

Dude, check out David. You can totally see his weiner! And his nutsack. And his pubes.

An art teacher in Texas has been fired because she took her students on a field trip to the Dallas Museum of Art where, it seems, they saw depictions of the human form.

Naked.

Without clothes.

The news article doesn't say just exactly what they saw at the museum. It may have been a weiner, like ol' Dave's at left. It may have been boobies. Who knows?

What I do know for sure is that the human body is dirty, evil, wicked, sinful, and lots of other words besides.

This, my friends, is a blow for the traditional values that made America great. For God's sake, if we allow fifth-graders to see nude art, what's next? I'll tell you what's next. This is a slippery slope, my friends, and if we do let ten-year-olds see nudity at a museum, before you know it, they'll be swapping strange rumors and wild, uneducated theories about...um, well, you know...ess-eee-ecks...on the playground at recess. They'll be sneaking looks at their Dad's Playboy magazines when their parents aren't home.

Of course, we can't fire filthy-minded smut-peddlers like this art teacher for being filthy-minded smut-peddlers or the pinkos at the ACLU get all fired up and start sticking their noses where they don't belong. Fortunately, this particular 28-year veteran, award-winning teacher also just happens to be a lousy, awful teacher, in dire need of performance improvement. What an unusual but fortunate coincidence!

Thank God we've got people like the fine, fine administrators like Principal Nancy McGee and Assistant Principal Manuel Gonzalez. Some people, some ACLU pinko types, might say that McGee and Gonzalez are over-reactive morons who respond like trained monkeys to a single slack-jawed, drooling fuckwit of a parent who doesn't want their precious fifth-grader to be exposed to dirty, evil, sinful nudity instead of standing by and defending long-time teachers. But those people are wrong. McGee and Gonzalez are clearly fine Americans, defenders of traditional values and of our precious, innocent children.



The artwork pictured above contains nudity and adult situations, and should not have been viewed by children.