Fraggmented

My Game Show Idea

2012-01-30T12:11:00.000-08:00

Actually, I have a couple of ideas for a game show. But my first idea, where contestants select from a variety of different briefcases that either contain large sums of money or angry marine lifeforms, was already stolen and used with some variations by NBC. Shame, really, because "Eel or No Eel" would have been a huge hit.

Seriously, though, I do have an idea for a game show, called "I'm Asking the Questions Here!" It would be a trivia show along the lines of "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?", but in this version, the questioner is actually another contestant. Two contestants are chosen, one to be the Questioner and the other the Answerer, and the Questioner reads out ten questions to the Answerer. Each question is worth $10,000. But, and this is the tricky bit, the Questioner has to guess before they read the question whether or not the Answerer will get it right. Basically, they make a "side bet" on whether they think the Answerer is going to guess correctly...and they have to do it without seeing the correct answer themselves.

So if the question is, "Who won the 1968 Presidential election? A) Ronald Reagan, B) Hubert Humphrey, C) Richard Nixon, D) Lyndon Johnson?" The Questioner reads it to themselves. They decide this is an easy one. They bet on the Answerer getting it right. They then read the question...and while they can't change the wording at all, they can emphasize the reading however they want to...and the Answerer answers. If they get it right, they both bank $10,000 and move on to the next question. Wrong, and both get zero.

But here's where the strategy comes in: At the end, only the one who has the most right answers gets to keep the money. (Ties go into sudden death.) So it is to the benefit of the Questioner to try to deliberately mislead the Answerer into guessing wrong, either through stressing the wrong answer or bluffing with their body language. But the Questioner won't necessarily know the right answer any better than the Answerer. So the Answerer has to decide a) is the Questioner trying to lead me into answering wrong, and b) how likely is it that they're correct about which answer they're trying to lead me to?

(It would make sense for the Questioner to get more money if they bet on the Answerer getting it right, as that way they also have an incentive to help the Answerer and the Answerer wouldn't always be certain that the Questioner was trying to sucker them. It would also add strategy to the Questioner's game, because the more questions the Answerer got right, the higher the Questioner's pot. But they couldn't let them get too many right, or they'd lose it all.)

It'd be a little complex at first, but I think it would be much easier to follow in practice than it would to read about. And I think there'd be a lot of tension as the two contestants played bluff and counter-bluff. "I thought that you were going to guess wrong on that one, so I bet against you, but then I read the question and you guessed I was tricking you and picked another answer...but I had it wrong too, so the correct answer was the one I thought was wrong and was trying to trick you into guessing."

Tell me that wouldn't be a fun little headtrip of a show. Get someone kind of snarky to host and commentate on it, like Wil Wheaton or Seth Green, and it'd be huge.

Review: Apollo 18

2012-01-26T12:05:00.000-08:00

Despite my utter disdain for 'The Blair Witch Project', the film that kick-started the genre, I've actually found myself with a serious fondness for found-footage horror movies. I loved 'Cloverfield', I adored 'Quarantine', I...well, okay, I ignored 'Paranormal Activity', but I said I was fond of the genre. I never said I was indiscriminate about it.

Given that, when 'Apollo 18' popped up on my radar, I made a mental note to give it a watch as soon as I got the opportunity. That turned out to be a Redbox rental well after it made its short, ill-received trip through theaters, but the drubbing the critics gave the film didn't dissuade me. I figured I'd give it a watch, and worst-case scenario, I'd be out a buck and 90 minutes.

Honestly, I wound up being pleasantly surprised. The movie does a lot of things right; the footage genuinely does look like NASA film from the 1970s in ways both large and small. The astronauts look like actual astronauts, not movie stars pretending to be astronauts. The jargon sounds right and isn't over-explained in a Hollywood way. The equipment looks authentic. The banter sounds like the kind of warmed-over private jokes that test pilots come up with, not like the over-polished work of a screenwriter. Even the film stock has that grainy quality you associate with shots from other moon landings. You can genuinely believe the opening statement that there's 84 more hours of this stuff lying around somewhere.

(That said, this may be part of the reason the film didn't do well in theaters. It's not like people routinely sit down and thrill to NASA footage.)

The tension of the mission builds at a nice pace, and it seems like the screenwriter thought about the alien lifeforms even if what we see on screen doesn't necessarily explain it outright. (The aliens tend to congregate in the bottoms of craters, suggesting that they prefer cold areas--this may be why the one inside the mission commander's suit goes "dormant" and curls up into its shell. They communicate over radio frequencies, a sensible evolutionary development for a lifeform that lives on an airless moon. And their "infection", despite being called that both by the astronauts and the Department of Defense, appears to be more of a venom or toxin spread by bites. All pretty logical.)

My only real complaint about the movie is that the most interesting part occurs a little too near the end. With one astronaut "infected", the other one is told that he will not be allowed to return to Earth for fear of contamination, and the pilot of the lunar orbiter is informed that he will not be given re-entry vectors if he allows him on board. This feels like the perfect opportunity to contrast the Apollo 13 "failure is not an option" mentality that NASA is known for, the belief that even the loss of a single astronaut in the service of space exploration is too much, with the cold-hearted, ruthless mentality of the covert world, where every man knows they're expendable for the "greater good". It felt like they could have spun that tension out for much longer, but instead it occurs right before the end. (Which brings up another question...how did NASA recover the footage?)

On the whole, I felt like it was a solid, respectable effort, and a worthwhile addition to the "found footage" genre. Not as good as, say, 'Cloverfield', but easily ahead of 'The Blair Witch Project'.

Strategies In America's Newest Covert War

2012-01-24T11:41:00.000-08:00

Last night during the GOP debates, Newt Gingrich (now the presumptive front-runner for the Republican Presidential nomination) suggested that it was time to declare a "covert war" on Fidel Castro. Some might say that this was blatant pandering to the heavily anti-Castro Cuban-American populace in Florida by attacking an 85-year old man who no longer holds any political office in his home country, but I take Newt at his word. He has the strategic vision to declare a covert war on live television after all; what more can you want from the next President? (Presumably, he took notes from John McCain's "secret plan" to take out bin Laden.) As I believe in Newt's goal of covert war on Fidel, let me suggest a few strategies.

1) We begin with a propaganda battle. Plant newspaper articles suggesting that young people wear their pants all baggy and listen to the rap music, and that women wear scandalously short skirts. These will angry up Castro's blood, causing him to have to avoid the news on his doctor's orders.

2) Cut vital lines of communication. If Castro's children and grandchildren are unable to contact him, he will grow despondent. This is especially devastating as a line of attack as they already don't visit enough, and goodness knows they never write him. They might insist that they email him, but Castro has already explained to them multiple times that he doesn't know how to work that new-fangled computer they gave him for Christmas. The resultant argument will drive a wedge between Castro and his closest supporters.

3) Hire neighborhood children to play on Castro's lawn at all hours of the day and night. The resultant stress, and the dangerous levels of physical exertion needed to repeatedly charge out of his house and yell at them, will keep him exhausted and further deteriorate his health.

4) Jumble up his pills. This will force him to spend valuable time and energy re-sorting them into the little boxes labeled M-T-W-T-F-S-S, assuming he can actually get the dosages right (his eyesight isn't what it was, you know.) This will only worsen his physical condition, softening him up for the final blow...

5) Hide his dentures. With this masterstroke completed, Castro will only be able to eat mushy foods. Not only will this further his loss of physical health, it will also keep him from being able to even smile at the people of Cuba. Surely this crushing blow will finish off the evil dictator!

...and if it doesn't, they'll at least put him in a home.

The Trouble With Romney

2012-01-18T11:59:00.000-08:00

...is that he's dead. No, wait. That was 'The Trouble With Harry', a classic black comedy directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Romney isn't dead; his trouble is that he just acts like it.

Seriously, how does a party as smart about winning elections as the Republicans have been over the last three decades wind up with this guy? The Republican party has been a classic case of picking style over substance, choosing likeable candidates that you'd "want to have a beer with" who easily beat smarter, better prepared wonks. George W. Bush was an absolutely terrible President, but he won against two people who were better on paper because he noticed that they were short on charisma, didn't have great social skills, and used attack ads to reduce them to caricatures of themselves (the self-aggrandizing stiff, the flip-flopper.)

And they now have Romney? For Pete's sake, Romney is what you'd get if the Republican caricatures of Gore and Kerry had a kid together! Not only does he have Gore's utter lack of personal magnetism, but he has Kerry's inability to stick to a position...all combined, of course, with an utter tone-deafness to the rising anger against America's wealthy Wall Street bankers, in a year where that's going to matter. (The article today, that he's only paying 15% in income taxes, isn't what's going to hurt him. The fact that he said he made "not much money" in speaking fees, when in fact he made more than my house is worth, is what's going to kill him.)

Of course, I know why the Republicans are going to get stuck with Romney. It's elementary game theory. Of the four candidates remaining who aren't Romney, all of them know that if the others drop out, they'll attract the support of the losers and beat Romney. (With the exception of Ron Paul, who is never going to attract much support but who isn't in it to win an election so much as for the soapbox.) But for that reason, none of them wants to drop out, because they all are hoping for someone else to drop out and give them the victory. And with four candidates splitting the non-Romney vote, Romney wins.

But do they really want Romney? It doesn't appear so, and you'll see that play out in the general election. It's hard to run when even your own party doesn't like you, and I suspect Romney's going to find out that they're not alone. It's pretty easy for your opponent to turn you into an unflattering caricature when you start out 99% of the way there.

Strange Things I Find Myself Saying

2012-01-11T12:22:00.000-08:00

I'm writing this blog on my lunch break at work, due to a catastrophic virus that has reduced my laptop to a paperweight until such time as I break down and reinstall the OS, and I find myself surprised at some of the conversations that go on. It's not a particularly exciting job, but somehow the discussions get actively strange. I'm not quite sure where it happens, either. One second I'm half-listening to a conversation on the merits of string cheese versus cottage cheese, the next I find myself speculating on whether or not cheese is actually a religion in Wisconsin, and if it is what the denominations might be.

I figure there's definitely Orthodox Cheddar, but is there a Reformed Mozarella? Perhaps a Seventh Day Gouda, established by a prophet who believed that the Armagorgonzolageddon was nigh at hand.

And what of the other faiths? Are yogurts considered to be pagan in the dairy world? Or do the nature-lovers worship milk, the original source of all other faiths?

And do these cheeses co-exist peacefully? Presumably they do, save for the Swiss. They're well-known for hole-y wars.

One thing I think everyone can agree on is that Velveeta considered to be the equivalent of Satanism. The antithesis of cheese, yet a cheese in and of itself, worshipped only by those who rebuke the whole concept of flavor itself. Hail Velveeta, the eternal and undying one!

Too many questions, not enough answers. Although it does answer why I get some strange looks at work...

Self-Taught Superheroes, Part Sixteen

2012-01-06T12:14:00.000-08:00

It's weird, the way dreams shift. You don't really notice it until you're trying to explain the dream to someone; at the time, it all seems perfectly natural. But when you wake up and try to relate the dream to someone else, you suddenly hit a point where you have to say, "And then for some reason I was a female Buddhist warrior monk from a hidden monastery in Tibet that had existed outside of time for centuries, and I'd come to San Francisco to learn about the outside world after a dimensional convergence restored the monastery's connection with reality, and I got picked up with a bunch of other hostages in Chinatown but I knew that after my training with the monks, the manual labor the guards were making me do was easy and so I just bided my time with the infinite patience of someone who was totally connected to the universe and waited to find out what would happen next...um, and I didn't actually dream all that, I just sort of knew it."

In case it's not clear, that's what happened. Suddenly, in the dream, I was Shining Dragon Fist, and I'd been down there in the cells for weeks, and I just knew that. And they were taking us all out of the cells and lining us up, and the guards had guns trained on us. And there were people crying, and pleading, and talking in a whole bunch of languages (yeah, big shock, Lord Raptor turned out to be the kind of guy who decided anyone who wasn't a white male was only suited for manual labor.) And I just stared at them, totally calm. Totally controlled. But underneath it all, I could feel my...well, she calls it her qi, but I always think of it as the soul. I could feel it surging, ready to flow out of me in a fury of action. And then...

And then this guy came charging in, wearing this suit of armor that looked like it had been welded together out of spare parts. His hair was standing completely on end like he was too close to a generator...mainly because he had this weird freaking generator on his back, like the backpacks the Ghostbusters wore. You could actually see places where harsh, actinic light was leaking out where there wasn't enough shielding. And these hoses came out from the backpack and ran down the arms to nozzles just over the wrists. (He's refined the armor a lot since then, but my dream actually had a really clear, solid memory of Neutrino Man's first suit. Have I mentioned how much he scares me?)

Then he started shooting. Superheated steam blasted out, sending guards staggering backwards. Even through their armor, something conducted into their bodies and left them wobbly and dazed. (Again, something that he insists leaves no permanent side effects, and you can trust him because he's a nuclear physicist. One Word: Chernobyl.) The remaining guards shouted, "Shoot to stun! He's one of Lord Raptor's VIP prisoners!" Others who didn't have as much discipline were shouting questions about how he'd managed to build something like that while under guard, and a few medics had already started tending to the downed soldiers.

That was when I moved. It felt different in the dream. In real life, when I fight, it's like suddenly everyone else is moving in slow motion and I'm at normal speed. When I was dreaming I was Shu, it was like I was swimming, moving slowly but with ineffable grace and striking out at statues. Qi flowed from my fists, turning each punch into a blow that could shatter stone and each kick into a thundering assault that practically ignored the guards' armor. They didn't even know what hit them at first.

But there were a lot of them, and they had human shields. It didn't take long for them to get past the surprise and start threatening the hostages. "Stand down!" the leader shouted. "Stand down or we shoot them all!" For Shu, it wasn't even a contest. I gently put my hands on my head and slowly sank to my knees, making it clear that I wasn't a threat anymore.

"What about you, hero?" the guard captain said to Neutrino Man. "What do you say?"

Neutrino Man smiled. "I say five, four, three, two, one..."

And then all the lights went out at once.

TO BE CONTINUED...

Best Comedy Series on TV

2012-01-02T18:49:00.000-08:00

Is anyone else watching "Finding Bigfoot"? Because this thing is either an absolute masterpiece of deadpan comedy on the level of This is Spinal Tap, or else it is one of the most perfect pieces of unintentional hilarity ever to be accidentally allowed on the airwaves. Right now, I am watching four grown men (well, three grown men and one grown woman) standing in the woods in the dark with a caged baboon, making loud screaming noises in an attempt to attract a "squatch". (The frequent use of "squatch" as a noun, an adjective, a verb, and an occasional interjection makes me wonder if I'm not watching an extremely strange version of "The Smurfs".)

And one of the cast explained that he was, and I quote, "fulfilling a lifelong dream" by taking a baboon out into the middle of the Catskills for the evening. I don't even know where to start with that, although it would probably be by researching New York's state laws on bestiality. This show is absolutely insane, in all the right ways. Oh, yes, and next week they're apparently going to be wandering through a Rhode Island forest with lighted torches. It's like watching a Darwin Award in progress.

Seriously, is this thing on Netflix or something?

Fun Factoid of the Day

2011-12-31T10:45:00.001-08:00

The first proper, official mention of the Time War comes during the novelization of 'Remembrance of the Daleks', when the Special Weapons Dalek recalls fighting in "the time campaign, the war to end all wars". This carries with it the interesting implication that for the Imperial Dalek faction at least, the Time War has (in part, at least) already happened. Meaning that perhaps this is the incident that Dalek Caan rescued Davros from...and the Seventh Doctor is participating in events out of synch with the Gallifreyan timestream. (Which is strangely in keeping with the Seventh Doctor's persona...)

It also confirms my general belief that the novelization of 'Remembrance' is actually the starting point for the 2005 series, conceptually if not actually. Which, in turn, confirms my general belief that Ben Aaronovitch is freaking metal.

If the 112th Congress Were Your Roommate

2011-12-27T12:16:00.000-08:00

Day One: You settle into your apartment, and you each agree on an equitable share of rent and utilities. The two of you sign the lease, taking an equal share of responsibility for making the apartment work.

End of Month One: Your roommate explains that he's starting his own business, which should bring even more capital into the system. He explains that for a little while, he needs to reduce his contributions to rent, but that this will pay for itself in the long run. When asked about the short-term, he suggests that the household just "run a deficit" for a little while. He shows you his business plan, and you agree.

End of Month Two: You find out that the business plan your roommate had was just a bunch of random guesses, and he's not spending any of the money he withheld on his supposed new business. When you confront him on this, he gets very upset that you're calling him a liar, and insists that you're just greedy and want his money. He tells you that if you want to balance the household budget, you could maybe cut the food budget (since he's eating out all the time anyway) and cut back on your heart medication and maybe turn out the lights when you leave the room. After a five-hour argument, you agree to turn out the lights when you leave the room. He does not concede anything.

End of Month Three: You're now having to kick in extra money to make ends meet on the household budget. Your roommate responds to this by suggesting that since you're clearly "hoarding" money, he should respond by reducing his contributions even further to get his business going and make the household function again. You point out that he hasn't spent any of the money he already has on his business. He accuses you of hating babies and caring more about homosexuals than you do about him. You insist that he start contributing his fair share again. He suggests that you look at the bills again next month to see if things change. When you refuse, he threatens to stop giving you any money at all and to let the landlord evict the pair of you.

End of Month Four: Your income is now stretched pretty much to its limit, as your roommate isn't even giving you all the money he promised to give you. When you point this out, your roommate suggests that you could probably make up the shortfall by selling your car, as he knows a friend who's in the market for one. He admits that his friend is aware of your financial troubles and won't offer too much, but some money is better than none, right? You point out that this is a short-sighted plan that will wind up costing you more in bus fare than it saves in gas, and he tells you that beggars can't be choosers. Reluctantly, you agree to sell your car.

End of Month Five: Your roommate is now driving your old car. He doesn't see why you're upset about the agreement he had with his friend to share it if you wound up selling it.

End of Month Six: Your roommate refuses to pay the phone bill, because he no longer uses the landline. You point to the agreement you signed with both your names on it. He shrugs. You pay the phone bill.

End of Month Seven: Your roommate finally agrees to pay the phone bill. A few hours later, you hear him in his room violently arguing with himself. A few hours after that, he comes out of his room and explains that he can't pay the phone bill after all. He appears to have hit himself a few times.

End of Month Eight: After another five-hour long argument, your roommate finally admits that his business plan has a few problems. He agrees to create a new business plan. The next day, he shows it to you. It's the same business plan he showed you seven months ago, only with pie charts and a new name.

End of Month Nine: Your roommate mentions that he got another angry call from the landlord yesterday about the rent, and he's not happy about having to deal with it. He suggests that you maybe stop spending all your money on drugs and prostitutes and work on making the apartment a better place again.

End of Month Ten: You find out your roommate has a $1000-per-week drug habit and has been bringing hookers into the apartment when you're at work.

End of Month Eleven: Your roommate starts pointedly reminding you that the lease is up soon, and that he's not sure he can support a deadbeat like you anymore. When you point out that he hasn't actually paid you his share of this month's rent yet, he calls you greedy. You find him in your room a few hours later with a tape measure.

End of Year: You start looking for a different roommate. Your roommate insists on being present every time you talk to someone, and calls them all communists.

The All-Crushed Team

2011-12-22T12:02:00.000-08:00

I don't know about you, but I'm really excited to see the trailer for 'The Dark Knight Rises'. It looks like we're going to get a genuinely intelligent Bane, a socially-conscious Catwoman, and even some football. The scene where Hines Ward outruns not just the defense, but the collapse of Gotham City's football stadium, looks to be a major set piece. But who exactly are we going to see on the field, plummeting to their deaths behind Ward?

This came up at breakfast today...um, no, really, it did. I live in a strange household...and we were talking about who we'd want to see killed by Bane in a brutal attack on Gotham's most beloved football team. For starters, we're pretty sure it's going to be a gadget play, with Michael Vick and Tim Tebow both on the field. Tebow would take the direct snap, behind the old Denver offensive line, but would lateral the ball to Vick. Vick would be planning to throw the ball to Tebow, but would find that he was being covered by Deion Sanders (who probably came out of retirement again, just to show everyone he was still as good as he said he was.) With Albert Haynesworth and Bill Romanowski advancing on him quickly, he looked to dump the ball off to Terrell Owens, but he'd quit on the route. So he had to pray for a long bomb to Ward.

That's where we left off--anyone else you'd like to see on the field for that play? Leave your choices in the comments!

Why I Don't Like Ballot Initiatives

2011-12-19T12:02:00.001-08:00

It should probably go without saying, but people who know me will tell you: I'm a pretty big fan of democracy. I vote, I encourage others to do the same...heck, I've even suggested in this blog that we make voting mandatory. It's not just a civic right, it's a civic duty, and it should be treated as such. And because I'm such a big proponent of democracy, it usually comes as a pretty big surprise to people that generally speaking, I think ballot initiatives are a terrible idea.

When someone said as much to me ("Are you against democracy?"), I replied with the simple statement, "No, but there's a big difference between democracy and mob rule." A ballot initiative is a single policy statement, made in a vacuum, usually vaguely worded and not made by experts. Rarely can those experts revise it subject to the realities of the situation. Frequently, the election surrounding it is subject to demagoguery and misinformation. To anchor your entire legal system around such statements generally cripples the creation of actual, sensible policy.

Take California, for example. California has been a big fan of the ballot system for a long time, and it shows in their budgetary crisis. They've had ballot initiatives that have overruled necessary-but-unpopular measures like tax increases with rules that hamstring the ability of the state legislature to raise money, passed by people who then turn around and complain that the legislature is ineffective in providing the services they need to live their daily lives. Initiative follows initiative follows initiative, like tying knots in a cord, until the law no longer stretches to where it needs to go.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that lawmakers are always sensible and wise and all-knowing. I read the papers just like everyone else. But the solution is what it's always been. Elect better lawmakers. Term limits and ballot initiatives and other gimmicks to save our system of democracy from itself only create new loopholes for canny criminals to game; the best solution is what it's always been, to put our best people into office and let them make their best decisions.

And to stop voting Republican. Because by this point, it's pretty obvious that "our best people" excludes them almost by definition.

An Interesting Interpretation of Stephen King's 'IT'

2011-12-15T12:08:00.000-08:00

I re-read 'IT' recently...well, relatively recently. Time moves pretty fast when you have a busy life, which is why I'm posting my Monday entry on Thursday. The point is, on re-reading it, I was struck by the idea that It doesn't actually seem to be very intelligent. That is, in all the scenes where it's interacting with people, it seems to be calculating and manipulative, finding people's secret phobic pressure points and skillfully working on them to extract the utmost in paralytic terror...

But in the scenes towards the end that are told from Its perspective, it doesn't seem to be much more than a mindless animal that kills and eats and sleeps. And it's interesting to re-read it in that light and consider the idea that maybe It's not intelligent at all. After all, just because something is capable of complex behavior doesn't mean it's actually reasoning; beavers build very complicated dams, but they do so purely on instinct. What if It works the same way?

Assuming It's telepathic (which seems pretty obvious from the book), it seems likely that it's capable of finding and reflecting our fears without ever actually understanding what they are. "If I look like this," It says to Itself, "and I make these noises that I see in that person's head, it will make them scared because this is what they are most scared of." Whether that fear is the Creature from the Black Lagoon or prostate cancer, it doesn't really matter to It. The fear is ours, the shape comes from us. Like all the old stories of a glamour, what we really see is ourselves reflected back at us. Even its attempts to scare off the Losers is nothing more than the blind reflex of a cornered animal, no different from a cat hissing or a rattlesnake's rattle save that we give it a more nuanced texture with our own thoughts.

Which means, of course, that in the end It's faintly pathetic. Because if It needs fear, if It feeds on fear (something King is ambiguous about...at one point, he suggests that the feeding is only because it's such a primal fear, but at another, he suggests that the fear merely seasons the meat...) Then it's never realized that it could live just as long by scaring the same people over and over. We're always scared by the same stories, always trembling at the same myths. Unlike animals, who eventually calm down once they no longer have the threat of harm, people can be scared again and again and delight in it each time. Whatever It is, It's old and sad and probably needed to be put out of Its misery.

(Unlike Misery, who probably should have been left alive. That writer was just being a dick. But that's another post.)

Top Ten Missing Episodes

2011-12-11T19:44:00.001-08:00

For those of you who haven't heard the wonderful news, two more episodes of 1960s-era Doctor Who were recovered today ('Galaxy Four' Episode Three and 'The Underwater Menace' Episode Two), bringing the total of recovered episodes to 36 and reducing the number of missing episodes down to 106. As always, this is a day of rejoicing for Doctor Who fans; as I mentioned in my post over at Mightygodking.com, no other fandom can really understand what it's like to not be able to sit down and watch every episode of their favorite series.

Interestingly enough, one article (full disclosure, written by a friend of mine who has a very good blog called "The TARDIS Erudotorum") cited these episodes as "not on anyone's Top Ten list of episodes to be recovered." Which led me to the interesting question, what exactly would the Top Ten list be? So, I thought, why not give mine? Keeping in mind, of course, that we have to keep it to individual episodes (so no "All of 'Marco Polo'") and also that, suckily enough, we can wish as hard as we want but that won't make it happen. So here are my picks for the most desired recoveries, should a benevolent deity grant our wishes.

10-9. The Invasion, Episodes 1 and 4. This one is the most interesting, even though it's at the bottom of the list, because it's the most likely. Rumors have persisted for years, started by none other than the late Nicholas Courtney, that a private collector has copies of the two missing episodes of this classic late-Troughton story, but that they're holding the BBC over a barrel and demanding an exorbitant fee before they allow the Beeb to "recover" them officially. (Courtney claimed to have actually seen copies of the film, which had picture but no sound. The BBC, as with all missing episodes, has sound but no picture. Any A/V club geek could resolve that problem.) Of course, this one is already "restored", in the form of Doctor Who's only (canonical) animated episodes, but it'd be nice to be able to watch the story as interpreted by the actors and not the creators of "Danger Mouse".

8-6. Power of the Daleks, Episodes 1-3. This is actually one I'd love to have in its entirety, but I'm trying to stick to the "individual episodes only" rule, and I just don't have the space for the full serial. And from the sound of things, to be honest, all the good stuff really happens before the Daleks give up on being cunning manipulators and just start killing people; the first few episodes are filled with tense political intrigue and the Daleks actually being clever and subtle, which is such a twist for them that I'd love to see it. Couple that with Troughton's first three episodes in the role, and I would love to see it come back home.

5. The Tenth Planet, Episode 4. And speaking of "regeneration stories", this is probably a lot of people's Number One missing episode. It's certainly of tremendous symbolic significance; the final appearance of William Hartnell, the first actor to take the role, is a major cultural touchstone among fans of the series. But I suspect, having seen the first three episodes, that it's more interesting as a "religious relic" than as an actual story, which bumps it a bit below everything else on the list.

4. The Massacre, Episode 4. Yes, I know. It does seem a bit odd that I'm actually prioritizing the first appearance of Dodo over the final appearance of Hartnell, but I really want it for all the bits prior to that. This is, by all accounts, a remarkably intense episode, with a shocking and devastating climax to the events in France followed up by a genuinely emotional confrontation between Steven and the Doctor. It would be well worth the small price of Dodo's near-nonsensical introductory sequence to get the scenes preceding it.

3. Mission to the Unknown. This has always sounded like one of the truly fascinating, quirky episodes of the series; a one-part story in an era where six and seven-parters weren't at all unusual, a story that features absolutely nothing of the Doctor, not even a mention, and a story that ends with the nominal hero dying at the hands of the Daleks, the Doctor's arch-enemies, with his dying message lost. I don't think it'll ever have the impact that the original story had (especially when it was followed up on with a four-parter that had nothing to do with 'Mission'...for almost five weeks, fans watched the show with the lurking knowledge in the back of their heads that the Daleks were out there, getting ready to conquer the universe, and the Doctor didn't even know about it.) But I would dearly love to see it.

2. Evil of the Daleks, Episode 7. This is another "Dang, I want every one of the missing episodes of this one!" story. But if you can only have one on the list, then it's got to be Episode 7. Absolutely got to. The Doctor's final gambit against the Dalek Emperor, the revolt of the humanised Daleks, the civil war on Skaro...this was epic stuff, and we've been denied it.

1. The Daleks' Master Plan, Episode 12. And speaking of "epic", this was a freaking twelve-parter. That's almost a whole season, one of the grandest and most ambitious stories ever done in the history of 'Doctor Who'...and the climax, involving the death of a companion (well, possibly, depending on how you count these things) and the destruction of worlds and Daleks melting from existence and great big huge exciting stuff, is gone. Possibly forever. **sniff** Could we have it back, please?

What's Worse Than Pedantry? Inaccurate Pedantry!

2011-12-08T12:26:00.000-08:00

At this point, it's almost as big of a cliche as the cliche it's making fun of: Whenever someone says, "I want everyone to give 110%!" someone else responds with, "You can't give more than 100%. It's the maximum amount possible." Cue people smirking at the stupid guy who delivered such a tired and lame motivational gimmick, or at least that must be what people do because jokes about mathematical fallacies rarely bring in the real yuks.

Except that it is entirely possible to give 110%. If I work at a call center, and the goal for the week is to take seventy calls a day, and I take seventy-seven, I have given 110% of that goal. If I sell vacuum cleaners, and my average sales-per-week is 200 vacuum cleaners, and this week I sell 220, I have given 110% of my usual effort. If I am a running back, and my personal best is a 100-yard rushing game, and I have a 110-yard rushing game, I will have given--guess what? That's right, 110% of my personal best.

Numbers greater than 100% exist. They are used routinely in mathematics and everyday life. When you tell someone "You can't give more than 100%," all you are really telling them is, "I'm not only a smug and arrogant cynic, I'm also bad at math, too!" Which isn't exactly the message you want to be sending. (I hope.)

Crazy Fan Theory of the Day

2011-12-01T12:19:00.000-08:00

Why stop with Season 6B?

Think about it. The stories normally associated with a Second Doctor who served as a secret, deniable agent of the Time Lords in between "The War Games" and "Spearhead From Space" feature a Patrick Troughton who looks considerably older than he did at the end of Season Six. (Admittedly, Steven Moffat chalks this up to "shorting out the time differential", and suggests that Time Lords revert back to their youthful state when no longer around their future selves, but he doesn't say that they can't look old because they're old.) He mentions his age as roughly 400-450 in "Tomb of the Cybermen", and Romana gives it as 759 in "The Ribos Operation", meaning that there's a 300+ year span of adventures in there (with plenty of room for gaps, especially in between "The Deadly Assassin" and "The Robots of Death", but the point is there's a lot of time to be accounted for.) And the Time Lords discuss a change of appearance, but they don't really present their actions at the Doctor's trial as a capital crime (or 1/13th of a capital crime.)

And when the Doctor regenerates, it is always into the form of a man in the prime of his life--of all the regenerating Doctors, only Pertwee was over 50 when he was cast in the part. And we don't see that regeneration. And according to fan lore, there's a gap in that space where missing adventures occurred. And the Third Doctor has plenty of suspicious gaps in his memories.

What if the Third Doctor, as well as the Second, operated for years as an agent of the Time Lords? After finally regenerating due to old age, he regenerated into a young, fit Jon Pertwee (who I for some reason picture as dressing like John Steed from 'The Avengers') who eventually, after a long period of service to the Celestial Intervention Agency, was finally sent to Earth to begin his official exile. This Season 6C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, X, Y and Z would also explain where the new Doctor picked up his driving skills, Venusian karate and aikido, and tattoo.

I propose that once the Past Doctor Adventures return, we...what? I can dream, can't I? I propose that once the Past Doctor Adventures return, we see the final adventure of the Troughton Doctor, and the first adventure of his young successor. What do you say, BBC?

I Atent Dead

2011-11-28T18:45:00.000-08:00

I just haven't felt a whole lot like writing these last couple of weeks. Not in an "I'm depressed and miserable and sunk into my dark squalor of the soul" sort of way, just in a "writing feels too much like work and I'm taking a break" sort of way.

Then I remembered that the last time I did this, I started a blog to make myself write to a schedule so I wouldn't get into the habit of not writing. And oh yeah, this was it. So it's back to blogging, even if I don't feel like it. Today, we discuss being stupid.

Exhibit A: Governor Sam Brownback. For those of you who haven't heard, he's the governor of Kansas, and he apparently has given his staff orders to monitor Twitter and Facebook for mentions of his name. So when an 18-year-old girl on her way back from a school trip to the state capitol made a joke on Twitter about telling the governor that he "sucked", they went to the high school principal and read him the riot act. And he, being fully willing to pass the pain downward, summoned the girl in question to his office and berated her in an attempt to browbeat her into writing a letter of apology. The girl, to her infinite credit, refused.

(Well, okay, not to her infinite credit. After all, she is trying to make it a point of principle that she should be allowed to tell someone they suck so long as she meant it as a joke. Hopefully, she has learned a valuable lesson: You can never be sure that the person you're saying bad things about won't hear it. Never say anything to anyone that you'd be ashamed to say to their face.)

But the point is not about bullying, or about abuse of political power. The point is, and the reason why the governor (or, strictly speaking, his staff--he's apologized and disavowed the act, if you want to be charitable and assume he's telling the truth) was stupid, was because nobody would have heard about this if he hadn't said anything. Teenage girl saying "the governor sucks"? Tweeted to sixty people, most of whom forgot it two minutes later. Teenage girl being forced to write letter of apology to thin-skinned, tinpot dictator of a governor who has a paranoid obsession with social media? That's the kind of thing that's in the news for days, nationwide. What he did wasn't just an abuse of power, it was counter-productive.

It's like Harlan Ellison said, when talking about the man who rejected his screenplay for 'I, Robot'. "Every new director asked to see the script I wrote," Ellison said, "and he said, 'We're not making that script, he said I had the brains of an artichoke!' Which just goes to prove me right. After all, I wasn't spreading it around town."

Evil Toy Monkey--The Series!

2011-11-05T08:53:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite MST3K movies is "Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders". I actually like it, even on a level above and beyond finding the riffing funny. The reason for this has a lot to do, strangely enough, with the decision to re-use footage from another movie to pad out the film.

For those of you who haven't seen the movie, it's the adventures of Merlin in the modern day; he decides to travel to the present and open up a store that sells enchanted tchotchkes in an effort to bring back belief in magic and restore the prestige of wizards. (Which actually sounds vaguely creepy, but...) The movie is clearly an old TV pilot that was repurposed as a movie after it didn't go to series, and the plot abruptly shifts halfway through to focus on a cursed toy stolen from Merlin's shop that he's trying to recover. (There's also a framing sequence that pads the film out further, which has Ernest Borgnine as a retired screenwriter telling the story to his grandkid.)

The thing is, only the first half is an old TV pilot. The second half is a heavily edited version of an existing movie, called "The Devil's Gift", about a cursed toy that slowly grows in power and threatens the life of a father and son. They cut the film down heavily, edited in some footage of Merlin looking for the toy (one of those little cymbal-playing monkeys, which does, in all fairness, look really damned creepy--every time it claps its cymbals, something dies.)

But the reason I like it is that in "The Devil's Gift", the story ends with the toy monkey just straight up killing everyone. At the end, after the hero (the dad) thinks he's gotten rid of the monkey for good, Grandma finds it and brings it home and it blows up the house with everyone inside it. Brutal, miserable, joyless, bleak, unsatisfying ending...but "Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders" changes it. In this version, Merlin shows up at the last second, stops the toy, and saves everyone. He takes it back to his shop, scolding it with the words, "I'll deal with you later," like he's dealing with a naughty pet.

I love this idea. I love the idea of Merlin actually going into the unhappy ending of another movie and stopping the main characters from dying. It feels like what a true hero should be doing, far moreso than the first half of the movie (the actual pilot, where Merlin delivers the comeuppance to an obnoxious reporter by luring him into dabbling with magic.) I think that they should do this with more old movies.

Hence my idea for the regular "Merlin's Shop of Mystical Wonders" series. Every week, they take an existing horror movie (like, say, "Night of the Living Dead") and recut it, adding in scenes of the Evil Toy Monkey being responsible for everything and Merlin wandering around looking for it. (Picture Barbara looking at the stuff on the mantelpiece, and then they cut to the Evil Toy Monkey.) And of course, at the end, when things were at their worst, Merlin would show up, grab the Evil Toy Monkey, and everyone would be saved! (Cut to shots of random zombies outside the farmhouse collapsing as the spell is broken.) And every week, Merlin would take the Evil Toy Monkey back to the shop, saying, "I'll deal with you later."

...or I could just be out of my ever-loving mind...

Amazing Race 19, Week Five

2011-11-03T19:49:00.000-07:00

And after a second non-elimination leg this season (although arguably, the first one didn't really count as it was immediately followed up by a double-elimination leg) we take the short trip from Phuket to Bangkok. (Which does not make me feel quite as "twelve" as Phuket did, mainly because there are fewer ways to amusingly mispronounce it.) But first, there's some more Phuking to do. The teams set off by taxi to a place that gives elephant rides. Guess what they're doing?

Andy and Tommy, in first, get to the elephant ride, to the Road Block (where one partner has to dive into a pond and look for a package wrapped in burlap), through the Road Block, and back to their taxis all without apparently even seeing another Racer. In fact, they make it to the second Road Block (this leg's twist--each Racer has to do a separate Road Block instead of just one) before all the Racers have set out. Needless to say, this does not bode well for the Doublemint Twins.

The second Road Block is actually quite vicious, despite every team's anticipating it and trying to minimize it. The teams are first told they have to disassemble a Spirit House (a little model of a home with some tiny figurines present) and bring it to get the next clue...and only then told that one of them has to reassemble it, with no model or reference points beyond their own memory and the other models assembled a long taxi ride back the other direction. Andy and Tommy suspect it, but their memory isn't as good as they think it is, and they have to leave the Buddhist temple to get a second look. (And not, as might be suggested by their dialogue throughout the episode, because they are deeply offended by the temerity of foreigners to worship a god other than the One True Christ. Sorry, but evangelicals of any stripe rub me the wrong way.)

Jennifer is a lot nicer when she assembles her Spirit House, and she's also bright enough to borrow their cab driver's cell phone to snap a few pictures of the completed work for reference. I'll admit to some grudging respect for that, even if her brother and her bring out the worst in each other. The other teams show up, one by one, and separate themselves out into "smart enough to take notes" and "about to take an extra taxi ride." (Zac and Lawrence come the closest we've seen this whole race to bickering, as Zac repeatedly mentions that notes would be a good idea and Lawrence brushes him off, only to turn around and suggest that it's not his fault that Zac can't remember where everything goes.)

Meanwhile, several hours after the first team and a full hour after the closest team to them, Liz and Marie set off...and promptly hit a Speed Bump. Which they treat as the best experience of the entire Race, and quite possibly their whole lives to date. They get to shovel elephant manure (which they're actually happy about, so great is their love of pachyderms) and then wash an elephant...and yeah, I might be hardened and cynical, but it is hard to remain cynical in the face of twins cooing over an elephant and talking to it like it was their kitten. Definitely one of the high points of the Race so far.

After that, everyone jumps into buses to go to Bangkok. There is much drama over who gets on which bus and how much they have to spend on taxis, but at this point I will spare you some of the angst and cut to the chase: Nobody's stupid mistakes come back to haunt them because Liz and Marie are way behind, out of money, and relying on the kindness of strangers to limp to the Pit Stop. And they get eliminated. Which is a bit of a shame, as there are teams I liked less, but I wasn't enamored enough of the Doublemint Twins to get upset at their exit. And now there are seven, as we head to Malawi!

Self-Taught Superheroes, Part Fifteen

2011-11-02T19:29:00.000-07:00

"Page 4A," the man said, roughly yanking Lord Raptor's helmet off his head. "Last paragraph of the continuation of the front-page article." We still couldn't see who he was--Lord Raptor's helmet did a pretty good job of concealing people's identities along with protecting them from stun-blasts--but he had a pretty obvious mad-on for Lord Raptor. Which put him on our side.

He put his gun right up to Lord Raptor's cheek, prodding deeply into the flesh. Lord Raptor played it pretty cool, but you could see from his eyes that he was nervous. And he knew better than we did what that thing could do at close range. "'Several locals are missing in the wake of the attack; local authorities are co-operating with the federal government to investigate.' Sorry, but I decided not to wait."

"I don't know who you are," Lord Raptor said, his voice tight with tension, "but you should know you can't possibly get away with this. I have hundreds of men--"

"You can call me John Q. Public, pal. Nobody in particular, nobody someone like you would care about. The kind of guy someone like you steps on and ignores, right? You didn't even think about those people you kidnapped, the kids that might be waiting for them, the families that don't even know if they're alive or dead..." His finger tightened a little on the trigger. "Yeah, you might have hundreds of men. And they're all on the other side of this snazzy glowing wall of yours, aren't they? In here, it's just you and me."

Lord Raptor's eyes darted to the force field, then back to John Q. Public. (Which isn't his real name...I think...but it's what he calls himself, even to the rest of us. Josh has been trying to get him to open up, but he just kinda smiles and says he's fine answering to 'John'.) "Kill me, and they'll slaughter you."

"But you'll be dead," John replied. "I've been watching you for about a week now. Switched places with a guard during your raid on the steelworks in Pittsburgh. You talk big, but I'm pretty sure you don't have a lot you're willing to die for. You surrender now, tell your men to stand down and get the authorities in here, you get to live to try being crazy another day. You try to be a hero, I guarantee you're gonna be a martyr. I'm betting you won't take that trade."

The two of them stared at each other for a long moment. Josh and I looked at each other, then back to them. We weren't about to say anything, because we had no idea what to say or what to do. We were both pretty sure we didn't want anyone killing anyone...well, I was, and knowing what I know now about Josh I think he was, too...but it wasn't like we could do much about it. The tension turned seconds into minutes. Finally, Lord Raptor spoke. "Captain Williams!" he called out.

One of the men outside the field snapped into action. "Sir!" he responded, snapping off a salute.

"Contingency 14-B, I think," Lord Raptor said, as calmly as if he'd been ordering dinner. The captain snapped off a salute, and relayed the order through a comlink. "There, Mister...Public...we've activated Contingency 14-B. Now if you'll kindly put your gun away..."

"Not until I see this place so full of soldiers they can't breathe out too hard without being busted for fraternization, pal," John replied, giving a little jab with the gun to punctuate his sentence.

"I think you misunderstand," Lord Raptor said. He smiled, but it didn't touch his eyes. "Contingency 14-B means that we've put all of the hostages...formerly the laborers...under armed guard. There are currently seventy-two menials in the holding cells that are at hazard--not the full prisoner populace, of course, there are a few prisoners who have turned out to have valuable expertise that I'm not willing to lose--but more, I wager, than you're willing to sacrifice on my behalf."

He paused. "Think of all those sons and daughters, all those husbands and wives you'll have to break the sad news to. And all because you put my death ahead of their lives." He picked up his wine glass, raising it in a mock toast. "Or you can just put the gun down, surrender to my relatively tender mercies, and at least know that you saved seventy-two lives."

John's hand hung in the air for a second, but we could tell he'd already made his decision. He slammed the gun down onto the table without a word.

"There," Lord Raptor said. "Wasn't so hard, was it? Don't get me wrong, I admire your initiative, lad. But I have planned for every contingency. That's why these men follow me, because I know what to do in any eventuality."

That was when the force field switched off. A second later, so did the lights.

TO BE CONTINUED...

Amazing Race 19, Week Four

2011-11-01T20:55:00.000-07:00

Yes, I'm aware that I am significantly behind in my Race recaps. I don't know whether or not I'll be able to catch up, but I thought it over and decided that I would rather have the entire Race three weeks late than have it abruptly cut out midway through. After all, these entries have ages to be there after they cease being relevant as live events, but failure to finish is forever. So with that in mind, let's recap Week Four!

We begin in Jogjakarta again, with the teams heading to Phuket, Thailand. The Race dwells on this for a long time, making a fairly big deal out of the lead two teams' mistakes (they didn't spend enough time researching flights at the airport and wound up an hour behind everyone else instead of maintaining their lead...) But since it turned out that there was a huge Hours of Operation stopping point, the sequence is only really relevant for Lawrence's statement that he "couldn't remember" if he'd ever been to Thailand (either he's a very well-traveled man, or a really ambitious partier) and some really amusing mispronunciations of "Phuket". Yes, I am sometimes mentally twelve years old. Your point?

Frankly, I know that there's a lot of complaints about "bunching" on the Amazing Race, and generally I disagree with them. I think that winning a leg should be enough of a competitive advantage that teams want it, but making it insurmountable takes a lot of the excitement out of the Race. So I'm fine with bunching, in moderation. That said, this was a bunching point that happened after the show had tried to make a lot of drama out of who was going to get to Phuket first, and red herrings in a reality show are a little more obnoxious than usual.

Still, they made up for it with an excellent Detour. One choice involved making an artificial coral reef and placing it in a lagoon, which was difficult but could be completed quickly if the team worked together and knew their way around boats and water, and the other involved setting up beach chairs and umbrellas according to a display set up elsewhere on the beach, which was time-consuming but rewarded patience and attention to detail.

Only three teams, Liz/Marie, Cindy/Ernie and Lawrence/Zac, went straight for the beach chairs. As it turned out, there was a fairly brutal sting to this one; a strong wind sent their umbrellas blowing all over the place. Advantage: Coral! ...um, except that it's also hard to paddle in a strong wind, too. Oh, and there's a strong current to go with that strong wind, which practically disintegrates several teams' coral frames. By the time it's over, only two teams (Andy/Tommy and Jennifer/Justin) have managed to actually succeed in placing their coral; everyone else has moved over to the other leg.

Advantage: Liz/Marie, Cindy/Ernie and Lawrence/Zac! Well, except that Liz and Marie turn out to be really, really bad at sticking beach umbrellas into the ground so they'll stay. Despite getting to the challenge first, they are passed by every single team one after another until they're left to scream at each other, all alone. When the going gets tough, the tough bicker at each other and fail!

From there, the episode loses a certain amount of tension through no fault of the leg design. The teams have to do some actual navigating to get to the Road Block, which is a fairly well done rock climbing challenge (they actually make it about the climbing, not rappeling or using a mechanical climber, so athletic teams have a chance to gain time.) They then have to navigate to the Pit Stop as well, with an actual map! There's quite a bit of excitement over who will wind up in which position...with the unfortunate and clear understanding that the Doublemint Twins will be dead last.

And so they are...but lucky for them, elimination is staved off for at least one more week by Phil and his non-elimination wizardry. They get to move on from Phuket to Bangkok and try to make up some of the ground they lost. (I gotta say, even without the benefit of a couple of weeks of hindsight, it seemed unlikely.)

Storytelling Engines: All-Star Comics

2011-10-27T12:28:00.000-07:00

(or "The Sportsmaster? SRSLY?")

Looking at the 70s revival of 'All-Star Comics', it seems like a good idea. Much like the 80s revival of the Justice Society seemed like a good idea, or the 90s revival of the Justice Society, or the early 21st-century revival of the Justice Society, or the revival of the Justice Society that we're probably going to get in about five years when they've sorted out all the continuity fallout from 'Flashpoint' and have decided what the Justice Society is going to have been in the new DC Universe. After all, we're talking about iconic, classic heroes who've had a fan following for decades, being brought into the Modern Age with all-new adventures and all-new heroes joining them. How can you go wrong?

Actually, you can go wrong by assuming that just because a character is old, they're automatically classic and iconic. One of the big reasons that Julius Schwartz had as much freedom as he did to revamp the Silver Age versions of the JSA was because the franchises were so moribund; characters like Al Pratt and Alan Scott didn't really stir much of a memory in fans. Part of this, of course, was attributed to a general decline in interest in superheroes during the post-war era; with comics of so many other genres on the ascendancy, superheroes were considered to be kind of passe. (Looking at the newsstands of 1952 would come as an utter shock to a comics reader of today--between war comics, westerns, romances, true crime and horror comics, and sci-fi anthologies, the only heroes that could muscle their way onto the spinner racks were Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman.)

But was it really a case that superheroes were uninteresting, or was it a case of the genre not having many interesting superheroes? When you look at most of the titles that faded away, you'll notice that none of their revivals have had much success either. A Green Lantern who got their powers from a generic "magic lantern", and who owned a broadcasting company, does not have as many interesting and engaging story hooks as one who is a space cop who works for aliens and travels the universe and through time. And Alan Scott is one of the better Golden Age heroes. Al Pratt, the original Atom, is just kind of short and punches people. It's not a lot to hang your hat on.

The original Justice Society, indeed a lot of the original Golden Age characters, were the result of creators working out through trial-and-error what was interesting and what wasn't. We have been conditioned, as readers of modern comics who have seen plenty of love letters to the Golden Age, to see these as important and valuable simply because they were pioneers of the "superhero" genre, but really, a lot of them are hard to write for. It's hard to bring back villains like the Sportsmaster and make them relevant and menacing, or to make the Star-Spangled Kid seem like a sympathetic and interesting hero. The Silver Age versions of the characters can be seen as "second drafts" in that light, reworked to make it easier for writers to generate story ideas that will get the reader interested. Origins, rogues' galleries, day jobs, supporting casts...all of these need a serious rework on Golden Age characters simply to make them palatable to modern audiences.

And that's before you decide to treat their World War II adventures as canon, age them all into their fifties and sixties, and saddle them with the confusing "this all takes place in an alternate universe" scenario. Setting the whole thing in an alternate universe with a confusing backstory did more harm than most people realize; it's no coincidence that the most successful revamp of the JSA, the Geoff Johns run, took place post-Crisis. Batman will always have a more compelling origin than an adult Robin, Green Lantern will always have a more exciting reason to fight crime than his twin kids, and explaining why Superman has gray hair and can't fly is just one more thing that bogs down a story and prevents it from really getting started. The more continuity baggage your character has, the less time and energy you have to write new adventures for them.

None of which is to suggest that 'All-Star Comics' is bad. There's plenty of exciting adventures in there, and Power Girl and Huntress work effectively as a young, exciting, female version of the World's Finest in a universe that no longer has a Batman/Superman team. But the question should not be, "Why are these Justice Society relaunches so unsuccessful when they have such great characters?" It should be, "What is wrong with these characters that keeps them from working as a team and a series?" When you look at it that way, and then look at the elements of their storytelling engine, you quickly find the problems that keep the series from taking off. As long as the relaunches are determined to keep all of those elements, whether out of simple nostalgia or a belief that they're what readers are looking for, the Golden Age will forever stay a part of the past.

Self-Taught Superheroes, Part Fourteen

2011-10-26T06:41:00.000-07:00

Bombs.

It was kind of at that moment that I remember it really sinking in for the first time, that the weirdness was all really real. It wasn't just that I was running around in a costume; real people had really been doing that for years. It wasn't even that I had actual honest-to-goodness superpowers. No, the moment where it fully sank in that the world had become something that we only used to see in movies or in comic books was when I heard Lord Raptor explain that he had an actual plan to hold the world's capitols for ransom by teleporting bombs into their national landmarks. It was like...I was about to say, "It was like finding out that James Bond was real," but that's not true. James Bond is easy to believe in. It was like finding out that the crazy guys he fights were all real, every single one of them. It was a weird, shivery feeling that I don't think has ever fully left me since that day.

I didn't have much time to think about it, though, because Lord Raptor was still explaining his plan. "The teleport devices can travel to any point on Earth just as easily as they can tune in to other dimensions, you see." He gestured, and the soldier inside the force field with him refilled his drink. "We still haven't managed to sustain the portal effect--we're extending the duration almost every day, but it's a matter of meeting the power requirements--but a couple of seconds is long enough for a bomb to pass through, especially when we materialize it beneath the bomb and let gravity do the rest."

He took another slurp of his wine. It was bad enough to be harangued by a megalomaniac, but did he also have to be a sloppy eater? The energy barrier was spotted with little flecks of food. uGH. "And of course, there's absolutely no defense against an attack like that. No matter how much security you have, no matter how carefully you guard, we can just drop a bomb into the center of the Oval Office. Or 10 Downing Street, or the Kremlin, or..." He waggled the hand holding a chicken finger, letting a splash of barbecue sauce splatter onto the tablecloth. "You get the idea."

"And you'll do it if they don't pay up," Captain Light said. His whole body was taut, like he was barely constraining himself from just throwing caution to the winds and seeing how many soldiers, war machines, and robots he could take out before they brought him down. (Oh, yeah. Robots. Humanoid from the waist up, ten-legged spiders from the waist down. In the dream the legs weren't even metallic, they were actual hairy ugly spider legs. Not an arachnophobe, but ICK!)

"I have no interest in money," Lord Raptor said. "Only the things it purchases. And in this case, my goal is pure research. My payment will be in plutonium, molybdenum, exotic metals...you get the idea. The sort of thing that can power reactors, construct additional fusion generators, build larger portals that can transport regiments. Once I can sustain a portal long enough to fully explore my new domain, I will of course repay my debts. Think of this as a small business loan to an American entrepreneur."

"Can I instead think of it as a crazy guy planning to blow up the White House if America doesn't give in to his terrorist threats?" I asked, my face a picture of mock innocence. "Because I kind of am."

"I expected as much from you, dear girl," he said. I kicked the force field under the table. It hurt my foot, but I felt a lot better. "You're little more than a child, educated in a liberal school system to believe all that hippie socialist nonsense they spout. But I had hoped that Captain Light might understand that we do not live in an ideal world."

"Doesn't mean we have to give in to our worst impulses," Captain Light snarled. His fists glowed. I don't think he even noticed. "You're a thug, a madman, a terrorist and a warmonger. You make a scientific discovery that outmatches Einstein, you find a whole new universe, and all you can think of is how to strip-mine it. If you expected me to condone this madness, I'm happy to disappoint you."

"How unfortunate," Lord Raptor said. "Still, I believe we have a few holding cells left open. You can join our menial laborers and contribute to the effort in your own small way."

"Holding cells?" I said.

"Menial laborers?" Captain Light said. We looked at each other, both thinking the same thing.

"An unfortunate necessity," Lord Raptor said. "We have a need for menial labor, and my men have better things to do than haul and carry. We have conscripted a few individuals into service--they'll be compensated for their efforts when all this is said and done, but for the moment, the threat of force will have to suffice. Mostly people of the lower classes, those who won't be missed--"

"Except by me," the 'waiter' said, pulling out his sidearm and putting it to Lord Raptor's head.

TO BE CONTINUED...

Amazing Race 19 Recap, Week Three

2011-10-24T19:27:00.000-07:00

And so, after last week's Double Elimination, we are once again at the Episode 3-appropriate nine teams, all of whom are in Indonesia with only an hour or so separating the first place team from the one that barely squeaked by last time. And since they're not leaving Indonesia for this round, there will be no airport bunching, so that hour-long head start is going to matter a lot.

But not at the beginning, right? Because they start off with a bicycle ride through the streets of Jogjakarta, which is almost certainly just going to be a simple time-waster filled with local color, cute scenes of Andy and Tommy popping wheelies, and no chance for anyone to gain or lose spots going into the Detour...right?

Oh. Guess not. Looks like Ernie lost a pedal on his bike and by the time it was fixed, they dropped all the way to eighth. Well, that should put a little urgency into things.

And sure enough, it did. Not for Andy/Tommy and Laurence/Zac, who had a strong lead going into the Detour and made almost no mistakes as they went through the motions of feeding and watering a sheep(note the "almost", there; Andy and Tommy didn't fill up their grass bag all the way the first time, which gave Laurence and Zac a chance to catch up, while Laurence and Zac didn't read their clue all the way through and used extra buckets to fill the water trough faster, which will be significant later on.)

But the other teams had to move like crazy to get through the Detour. Lisa/Kaylani and the Doublemint Twins both decided to plant rice seedlings, while everyone else loaded themselves up with a pair of sheep and ran for it. They came out of the Detour in a very close pack...and then Marcus and Amani got there. This was kind of a theme of the episode, right up until the very end.

But before that end, there was a Road Block to get through, and this was the "brutal counting challenge" I mentioned last week. One member of each team had to climb to the top of an absolutely gorgeous Buddhist temple and walk around it counting statues of the Buddha...and recognizing, from the minimal hints given in the actual clue, that you had to not just count the statues but recognize that each one had a distinct hand position and you had to mimic that position when giving the count to the judges. The total number of statues was 69, but you actually had to give the judge a count of "17, 17, 17 and 18" while doing hand gestures. (No, not like that! Respectful and reverent hand gestures that the Buddha would make!)

Tommy and Laurence decided to work together, on the grounds that they got there at about the same time and get along well and are both nice guys and it's easier to do with two people counting. Have I mentioned how much more I enjoy the Race when it's got intelligent, competent, nice teams doing sensible things instead of starting pointless drama? They got the right answer on the first try, but it took them one more go before they figured out that they had to do the gestures. They sprinted off at the same time...but Andy and Tommy had to go pay their cabbie first, because they told him to wait. This was a) unbelievably significant for later, and b) why Laurence and Zac got to the mat first.

Only to get the Dreaded However from Phil. In this case, Phil finally mentioned that they misread their clue and incurred a 15-minute penalty. Not bad, but it was the difference between a comfortable second place and a trip to Dubai. (Andy and Tommy, by the way, were very sweet and apologetic to the other team when they checked in first.)

This left seven teams struggling to avoid last place. In theory, despite straggling in just as Andy and Tommy were leaving, Marcus and Amani should have had a huge advantage because Tommy just straight up told them the answer. Unfortunately, by this point in the Race, Marcus and Amani were already tired and frazzled enough that they just straight up forgot what Tommy told them by the time they got to the clue box, leaving them in the same boat as everyone else.

What followed was shot after shot of people wandering around, trying to figure out which statues they should be counting, how many there were, and how to report them to the judges. Numbers like 423, 201, and 68 got tossed around, but ultimately the teams had to pool their resources and work in groups to figure it out. Bill didn't join in, but he also figured it out on his own and got out of there before the other six teams. The Ernie/Marie/Jeremy/Justin axis figured it out not long afterwards, and bringing up the rear (but not by much) was Lisa and Marcus. After a pretty well-designed leg with clever challenges that actually force the Racers to think, it was still very close coming towards the Pit Stop.

Which is where that taxi thing came into play. Amani/Marcus and the Silence gained a huge lead in the final run to the Pit Stop because (ironically enough) their taxi drivers were so lousy that they figured they'd be better off getting a whole new driver if they had to go anywhere else. (In the case of the Silence, their taxi actually broke down about a half-mile from the Road Block and they had to hoof it.) Everyone else lost ground to one degree or another, which was why Bill got out of the Road Block in third but he and Cathi came in 7th, and why the Doublemint Twins dropped from the middle of the pack down to 8th, and why Lisa and Kaylani got eliminated.

All around, an exciting, close episode, and I'm looking forward to next week's Thailand leg!

Cheap Joke of the Day

2011-10-14T07:15:00.000-07:00

Pundit A: "The biggest problem Herman Cain has right now is that his economic plan is nothing but a collection of catchphrases and buzzwords disguising an incoherent disaster of an idea that will bankrupt the country, plunge the economy into another Great Depression, and cause the deaths of hundreds of thousands through the hardships of poverty and starvation, all while siphoning money to the pockets of the ultra-rich."

Pundit B: "I thought his problem was that he had trouble distinguishing himself from the rest of the Republican field."

Pundit A: "Po-tay-to, Po-tah-to..."

An Entirely Unfair Partial Review Of 'And Another Thing'

2011-10-13T19:22:00.000-07:00

I know. You're all probably thinking the same thing. "Why on earth would you even buy such a thing? 'Authorized sequels' to the works of famous dead authors tend to be on a par, in literary terms, with microwaved three-day old leftovers of gourmet meals. They are like finding out that the Lion's Tap is out of ground beef, so you decide to stop by McDonald's because you're really in the mood for burgers." (This is a reference that makes a lot more sense if you live in the Twin Cities.) "Why would you even bother reading one?"

The answer is, basically, that I really hated the ending of 'Mostly Harmless'. It was a bleak, morose read that even Douglas Adams said was not the place he wanted to leave the series, and it was only the fact that there was one deadline even the world's most famous procrastinator could not ignore that kept him from writing another book. A sequel to 'Mostly Harmless', even a sequel by someone who was decidedly not Douglas Adams (and really, apart from Douglas Adams and possibly Neil Gaiman, who is?) was superior to leaving the series where it ended.

And having gotten a bit over two-thirds of the way through the fully-authorized sequel, what do I think? Well, I'm not actually embarrassed to have bought it. But if I was Eoin Colfer, I think I might be embarrassed to have written it.

The real problem is the humor. Let's face it, Douglas Adams was known for creating brilliant, intricate, chinese puzzles of sentences that made his digressions so famous that everyone assumed he didn't create proper plots. (The actual truth is that he did create proper plots; it's just that his main characters made a point of not necessarily caring about them or even understanding them, so you had to read the novels several times to realize they had happened.) He was inventive, almost carelessly so, and his dialogue was full of strange and beautifully warped language.

And Colfer...Colfer is one of those people who thinks that it is tremendously funny to quote other people's jokes. He is the sort of person, in any conversation, who will try to crack you up by reciting Monty Python and never actually realizes he is the sort of person that XKCD made fun of. His attempts to pastiche Douglas Adams revolve around sly, winking little references to "forty-two" and ""Hotblack Desiato" and "tea" and the lines that Adams generally wrote a joke about and then moved on to writing new jokes about new things. He brings back characters as though this is generally more of a reunion special than an actual, proper book. And the plot, such as it is, mainly revolves around getting the characters out of the scrape they were in at the end of the last book and to what could reasonably be considered a happy ending. It is, suffice to say, not particularly ambitious.

And yet, I more or less expected exactly that. I didn't have high hopes for the book, I didn't really care if it would be any good--and that's not any kind of slight against Colfer, who I am given to understand is a very popular writer when he's not being asked to finish off someone else's story without the benefit of notes. So yes, it is unfair to complain about a book being bad when I didn't expect it to be good and haven't even finished it yet.

And yet, here I am doing it. This is why you couldn't pay me enough money to do an authorized sequel, because I know that there would be people out there like me waiting to write reviews like this about it.

Self-Taught Superheroes, Part Thirteen

2011-10-10T21:29:00.000-07:00

Dreams are weird things. Even when they feel totally real, even when you're dreaming about something that really happened, things that make perfect sense and feel totally natural to you turn out to be utterly surreal when you wake up. You surface out of the dream wondering just what the heck was going on in your subconscious.

All that is by way of explaining that Lord Raptor didn't really serve us chilled monkey brains at dinner that day in his headquarters. There was also no course that involved slitting open a dead python stuffed with baby eels. We actually got chicken fingers and french fries, for the record. I guess Lord Raptor didn't trust us with the good silverware.

Actually, he didn't trust us, period. We sat next to him, one of us on each side, but his chair was separated by a shimmering curtain of pure force that I didn't think even Captain Light could bust. At least, not before the hundreds of armed soldiers charged us; we were at the grown-up's table, but this was a full-on mess hall for Lord Raptor's troops. I counted eight hundred men in all, not counting the kitchen staff. (Lord Raptor had a guy behind the force field with him, passing him food and drinks from a hatch in the wall. I'm not sure if it counts as paranoid when you have a guy who can punch a hole in the side of a battleship sitting next to you and glaring angrily.)

"You might not realize it," he said conversationally between bites of monkey brain, "but I'm actually something of a philanthropist." (No, I wasn't freaking dreaming that. He actually said that to us.) "I want to bring about a new Golden Age of prosperity for the American Empire. My men, my fortress...these are just sensible precautions, that's all."

"You're a petty thief with fancy toys," Captain Light replied. He wasn't eating, just sitting there with his arms folded and his face set in a stony glare. (I, um, kinda was eating. Hello, hyper-metabolism!) "Tell yourself whatever lies you like, that's never going to change."

"Thief?" Lord Raptor actually smiled behind his helmet, his eyes twinkling with mirth. "Definitely. Petty? Anything but." I had a weird flash of insight, a sudden understanding of why all those supervillains in the comics and the Bond movies talked at heroes instead of just killing them. He was a total narcissist; in his head, this was just the first act in some kind of mental script that ended with us giving in and admiring his genius. He wanted validation, and we were a means to that end.

"My Exploratory Corps--the men you see around us--do you really think they would remain so committed to simple looting and plunder?" His arms swept out as if to encompass all of his mercenaries in a giant hug. "No, they are true patriots to a man. Patriots who want their fair share of the prosperity they bring to the United States, of course, but that's part of the American Dream."

"Let me guess," I snarked. "You're going to take over the world? Enslave the lesser races, subdue the indigenous peoples, and strip-mine the natural resources of all the piddling countries out there that have the nerve not to speak English?"

"Oh, my dear girl, you wound me!" he replied. "My new America will merely be the first among equals. Once my new technology has been perfected, a whole new frontier will open for the human race. A frontier filled with vaster and more exotic resources than the human race has dreamt of in all its vistas of exploration."

"Oh," I said. "So your men aren't in this for the looting and plundering. They're in it for the noble harvesting of the resources of a vast new frontier. And I suppose this exotic new frontier has, perhaps, a few natives already living there before you discovered it?"

"To be honest," he said, "I'm not entirely sure. We've only been able to sustain the dimensional portal for a few seconds at a time, not long enough to send a team through. We need more capital and resources before we can begin to truly explore. That's why we--"

"Loot and plunder," Captain Light said. "But you don't enjoy it." He and I exchanged a glance. If the force field hadn't been between us, I would totally have high-fived him.

"No, it's a regrettable necessity that takes us towards a greater good," Lord Raptor said. "Much like the bombs I have at the ready, should Washington decide not to fund my plans."

TO BE CONTINUED...

Amazing Race 19 Recap, Week Two

2011-10-08T19:23:00.000-07:00

After a non-elimination leg last week, this week gives us the ominous Double Elimination on the Amazing Race. They spelled it out last week for the losing couple, and this week they make it clear to everyone; coming in 10th is just as bad as coming in 11th. This ups the stress level a little for everyone as they head to Indonesia, and we get plenty of reaction shots of people whimpering and panicking and generally saying, "Wow, this sucks!" (Maybe these people are a little under-ambitious, given how many of them seem to be worried about not coming in 9th.)

There's a lot of airport bickering, which is genuinely unfortunate; Justin and Jennifer have the kind of sibling relationship generally described in a Eugene O'Neill play, and we're stuck watching it. We get a long, brutally whiny sequence between the two of them, and then they blessedly go off to sulk at each other while we fly to Jogjakarta!

After that, we get what looks like a genuinely terrifying taxi ride to the Road Block (seriously, there are countries where you take your life in your hands when you get into a moving vehicle, and Indonesia looks like one of them. The taxi drivers looked like the only laws they obeyed were the laws of physics, and then only reluctantly.) Bill and Cathi, last week's last-place finishers, got a cute little Speed Bump where they had to untangle some climbing ropes, and then everyone went spelunking. (Personally, I think "spelunking" is a better term for throwing heavy rocks into deep bodies of water. Spelunk! Spelunk!)

The Road Block was decent enough--the Racers had to rappel down into a hollow lava tube, retrieve a ceremonial mask and dagger, and return--but it's really not the sort of thing that gave the later Racers a chance to catch up or the early Racers a chance to fall behind. It was more or less just a straightforward, "What order did you get here?" challenge. But the Detour...

Okay, the Detour wasn't that exciting either. It was a split between one of the Race's fairly blah "try to get money out of strangers" challenges, which I've never been a big fan of (something to do with the fact that people from an affluent nation who are also trying to win obscene sums of money are also begging for cash from people who probably can't spare it)...and another "try to get money out of strangers" challenge. Meaning that no matter which Detour they chose, we had to see people doing stuff nobody wanted to try to wheedle change out of strangers who had better uses for the money. If I wanted to see that, I'd go to New York. (Rimshot.)

But after the Detour, that's when the Race went from the mediocre to the absolutely sublime. Because when the Racers collected their cash, they had to go to an orphanage and turn it in to get their next clue. That's awesome in and of itself. The Race has done a few things like this lately, where the Racers actually have to do something constructive and decent for the people of the country they're in, and I can't approve enough. And what happened next was even better.

You see, there was a little sign next to the grateful orphans who all cheered and clapped at the friendly Americans handing them money. And what it said was, in essence, "Don't stop with the money you collected on the Detour; give all the cash in your possession to the orphanage before you leave." The orphans still gave the clue that led to the Pit Stop, mind you. You could still leave without reading the sign and you would know where to go. But when you got to the Pit Stop, Phil would (and did, several times) tell you to go back and give until it hurts.

And so, the actual question of who would get eliminated was determined not by luck or even physical skill, but by attention to detail and careful reading skills. Several of my favorite teams became even bigger favorites by stopping to read the sign like any good team should, and I got a little bit of a schadenfreude charge out of seeing a couple of my less-favorite teams get the "However" from Phil. (When Lisa and Kaylani showed up, Phil reversed it by saying, "You got here tenth...however...a whole bunch of other teams failed to read the sign you read, so you came in 3rd." The response, "I hate you so much right now.")

In the end, irritatingly gimmicky Survivor survivors Ethan and Jenna came in 10th, and adorable but out of their depth gay couple Ron and Bill came in 11th. Both are now gone, and short of seeing Justin and Jennifer get the boot, there's really not a whole lot that could improve my mood. Most of the remaining teams are nice, lots of them are interesting, and there's a lot of people I can root for here. I'm looking forward to this Sunday's episode!

(Which, from the looks of things, will involve an utterly brutal counting challenge. I always love these!)

If Arthur Dent Was In 'The Dark Knight' Instead of Harvey Dent

2011-10-06T19:02:00.000-07:00

"Mister Dent?"
"Hello? Yes" said Arthur.
"Some factual information for you. Have you any idea how much protection that coin would offer if I just let this building blow up?"
"How much?" said Arthur.
"None at all."

"All right," said Bruce. "How would you react if I said that I'm not a dissipated old-money playboy at all, but actually a brutal street-hardened vigilante who dispenses justice at night in the alleys of Gotham?"
"I don't know," Arthur said, taking a pull of beer. "Why, do you think it's the sort of think you're likely to say?"

"You barbarians!" he yelled. "I'll sue Commissioner Gordon for every penny he's got! I'll have him hung, drawn and quartered! And whipped! And boiled until...until...until he's had enough."
Batman was running after him very fast. Very very fast.
"And then I will do it again!" yelled Arthur. "And when I've finished, I will take all the little bits, and I will jump on them!"

"So this is it," said Arthur, "we are going to die."
"Yes," said Rachel, "except...no! Wait a minute!" She suddenly lunged across the chamber at something behind Arthur's line of vision. "What's this switch?" she cried.
"What? Where?" cried Arthur, twisting round.
"No, I was only fooling," said Rachel, "we are going to die after all."

Arthur blinked at the walkie-talkie and felt he was missing something important. Suddenly he realized what it was.
"Is there any tea in this warehouse?" he asked.

"Look," said Arthur, "would it save you a lot of time if I just gave up and went mad now?"

Self-Taught Superheroes, Part Twelve

2011-10-04T19:00:00.000-07:00

I will remember my first sight of him until the day I die. He gleamed as though he was lit by sunshine wherever he stood, as if he stood in a slightly brighter world than the rest of us. His hands glowed with that same summer light, but even stronger; when he fights, sometimes it's hard to actually see his fists beneath the aura they project. His costume was a mix of bright, vivid red and rich blue, with the scales of justice emblazoned in pure white on his chest. (And okay, not that I'm really into him because he's way older than me and it'd be creepy if he actually wanted to date a sixteen year-old girl, but he's a total hottie.) And somehow that silver headband with the sculpted wings looked just right on his head.

I should stress, for the benefit of everyone who might be forgetting that I was dreaming about that day, that the Groucho Marx glasses and big fake cigar are not part of his actual ensemble. (Adam, on the other hand...)

The two of us stared at each other for what felt like forever. Probably more for me than for him. Finally, he spoke. "Hi," he said. "I'm Captain Light."

"I know," I said. "Um, I mean, I saw the picture of you in the Herald. The one where you stopped the bank robbery. It was kind of blurry, but um...not hard to miss." I paused, wondering what to say to the hero who'd inspired me. "Oh, right. I'm Hummingbird." I waved a little. "Hi."

"Hi," he said again. He smiled shyly. I suddenly realized that he wasn't sure what to say either. It kind of crashed in on me in that moment that the big famous superhero that inspired me to fight crime, the man whose name was synonymous in the newspapers with "heroic", hadn't even been doing this for a full year yet. He didn't really know much more about what he was doing than I did. It was a little like going up in a plane for your first flying lesson and finding out that your teacher had just gotten his pilot's license last week.

"I, um...I followed one of their planes here," he continued. "Normally I can't keep up with them, but this one had suffered some engine damage. Slowed it down just enough that I could stick with them. What about you?"

"I stowed away," I said. I tried to make it sound like an actual plan. "I was looking for their communications center, figured maybe I could bring the army down on them."

He nodded. "That's a really good idea," he said. "Better than mine. I was just figuring that if I found Lord Raptor himself and brought him in, then maybe the group would lose direction. Or something. I'm, um...I'm actually still figuring this whole thing out as I go." His eyes widened, painfully blue and earnest beneath his mask. "I just feel like if I have these powers, I should do something good with them, you know? Something to help people."

I nodded so fast my head blurred. "Yeah!" I said. "I mean, there are people out there getting powers practically every week, it seems like, and what do most of them do? They go out and rob banks, or beat up people who ticked them off, or just wreck stuff for fun. I don't get it."

"Not all of them," he said. "I've met a couple of people like you, really nice people who want to do something to make the world a better place. Like--" His fists suddenly surged with light. "Oh, right," he said. "Um, we should probably save this for later."

I turned around to see another dozen or so of Raptor's goons. They were all hugging the walls, probably because if they didn't they'd get stomped on. And looking at the thing that would do the hypothetical stomping, it would probably leave them pretty permanently unable to get up.

It stretched maybe twenty feet down the hallway, and looked like a giant mechanical lizard with eight legs. The "head" was actually a shielded canopy, with a human pilot in the cockpit. Twin shoulder-mounted cannons looked like they were a lot more lethal than the stun guns that the infantry was packing, and the "chest" had racks of missile launchers that I didn't want to think about. It's hard to dodge things like clouds of toxic gas or walls of expanding flame.

Captain Light didn't hesitate. He flew right past me and charged, hammering his fist straight into the cockpit of the mecha. (Oh, yeah. Anime as well as D&D.) There was a coruscating sunburst of light, and a sound like a jackhammer striking a gong...but the metal barely even dented. The mechanical beast wasn't even rocked backwards.

Loudspeakers clicked into life as the man in the cockpit spoke. "Lord Raptor requests the pleasure of your company for dinner," he said. The cannons swiveled to target us both. "Formal dress is not required."

TO BE CONTINUED...

Amazing Race 19 Recap, Week One

2011-10-03T18:50:00.000-07:00

Oh, hey--the Amazing Race started again! Sorry, I really did mean to say something about this earlier, but there was a lot of blogging to do, and then there was a season finale to Doctor Who that was a lot of fun, and before I knew it the second episode had already aired. So let's at least try to catch up with events in the first leg so that we can get around to recapping the second leg before the third leg airs, okay?

Said first leg begins in California, in a very picturesque Buddhist temple near LA. We are introduced to the eleven teams...and since this is a big chunk of the episode as well as just generally important, since they're our "cast" this season, let's take a long look at them. In no particular order...

Laurence and Zac: This is already a favorite team of mine, as well as probably a favorite to win. The kid has already circumnavigated the globe in a sailboat; needless to say, "killer fatigue" is not going to be one of his big issues. The dad seems active enough to overcome his age differences, and they both seem relentlessly polite, quiet and nice. These are the kind of low-drama, high-competence teams favored in our household.

Ernie and Cindy: Oh, look. A dating team, one of whom describes themselves as a "control freak" and talks in self-deprecating terms about how they fight but love each other. Toss those on the pile with the rest, will you? Admittedly, they don't seem to be as spectacularly train-wrecky as some of the "bickering couples" we've seen on the Race, and I give Cindy major points for saying thank you to people in Chinese on this leg. But nothing has convinced me yet that they are going to be enjoyable to watch. They seem competent enough, though, and I suspect they'll be around for a while.

Jeremy and Sandy: Technically speaking, they are on the Race. All the evidence seems to suggest it. Their names are on the credits, they are listed in the Wikipedia entry for the season, the CBS website lists them as being in the show. However, I must admit I have no memory of them. Neither good nor bad. Their appearances made literally no impression on me. If the Silence were running the Amazing Race, this is what they would be like. (Minus the electrocutions, of course.)

Justin and Jennifer: Hate hate hate die die die shutupshutupshutupshutup! But enough about their dialogue for the entire first episode, what do I think of these two? (Rimshot.) Seriously, they cannot exit the Race fast enough for my tastes. They are whiny, they are in perpetual bicker mode from Second One, and they actually act, in interviews, as though this is endearing behavior. Elimination is too good for them.

Ethan and Jenna: This season's token "stunt couple", they are both winners of Survivor and he is also a cancer survivor to boot! Presumably, they also are searching the world for the hook-handed man who kidnapped their infant daughter to induct her into their ninja clan, unknowing that she is actually the last heir to Narnia. Oh, and despite all that they're still remarkably boring.

Andy and Tommy: Apart from the fact that I keep expecting the bearded one to break into "The Rainbow Connection" at any second, these two actually seem like nice guys. They also seem like they're dumb as posts, the pair of them, but appearances can be deceptive...and athleticism and a positive attitude can carry you past a lot of challenges in this series.

Kaylani and Lisa: Why is it, whenever there are two women on this show that start right out by telling everyone how they're not stupid and lots of people think they're stupid but they're really a lot smarter than they look and sound, that it immediately makes them come off as dumb? I wish I knew, and I'm worried that it might be me. In any event, they are this season's Pretty Women Who Will Show Everyone That Pretty Women Are Competent. (They are not off to a great start in this episode, but more on that later.)

Liz and Marie: Unfortunately for them, they have already been nicknamed the Doublemint Twins in our household and they don't seem likely to be able to do anything to shake that nickname. They also don't seem likely to last very long; they're young, they don't seem to have a whole lot of reserves of patience, and they don't have the life experience to teach them how to deal with stress.

Bill and Cathi: They seem nice. Boy do they seem nice. They seem like they would instantly make friends with all the other Racers, the kind of friendships that last well beyond the Race. Even years later, I see them as the type that are still sending out Christmas cards to Liz and Marie and cooing over Jeremy and Sandy's baby (who may be named Melody and may not be theirs)...and all those connections will be forged on the strength of about three episodes, because that's how long I give them.

Amani and Marcus: This season's Overcompetitive Guy and Supportive Wife, Marcus seems to at least be one of the nice Overcompetitive Guys who runs around and makes grunting noises, as opposed to one of the Overcompetitive Guys who trash-talks everyone else and pouts whenever anything goes wrong. Still better in small doses, though.

Ron and Bill: They seem like the "sweet gay couple" version of Bill and Cathi. Really nice, very friendly, definitely the kind of people you can root for...but you can just tell after about five minutes that they're going to go out early. Very, very sweet though.

So after all these characters are introduced, they all begin racing! The first challenge is to find an umbrella with letters on it that complete a word puzzle involving the teams' first destination. I like the idea, but unfortunately it's yet another Race puzzle with a brute force solution, and most of the teams simply sprint back and forth between Phil and the umbrella stand until they find the one they're looking for. The last team, Kaylani and Lisa, add injury to injury by getting a Hazard for being in last. (Hate this. Bad Race design to penalize the team that's already furthest behind. But given that Kaylani and Lisa manage to screw themselves far worse than the Race designers could even dream of, heck with it.)

Which is what happens next, as Kaylani and Lisa lose one of their passports at the first gas station. Much drama ensues--and for the record, this does not feel like a "bickering team" thing to me. This feels like, "We are completely and totally FUBARed and we haven't even hit the first airport and I am very upset." I think that anyone who thinks they would handle this well hasn't gone through it.

Luckily, a random stranger finds the passport, discovers from Twitter that the women with camera crews following them around are probably on the Amazing Race, and drives it to the airport on their behalf. I am not saying they wouldn't do this for the 62-year-old couple, but it probably didn't hurt that they were astonishingly beautiful women.

From there, we all just skip to the chase and get to Taiwan, where there's a beautifully designed puzzle that tests everyone's mental abilities. No brute force solutions, just a simple case of listening and repeating a key phrase. This is the kind of simple, yet sublime challenge that I love about the Race when it happens.

...of course, Bill and Cathi are four hours behind everyone else because they can't find the clue that leads them to the Road Block, but that too is part of the Race. They wander around for ages while everyone else does the challenge (and the subsequent relatively simple Dragon Boat race afterwards), nothing but Amazing Editing ever suggests that they even come close to seeing another team, and honestly, they are the luckiest recipients of a non-elimination leg ever.

And next week, which is now last week, we get a double-elimination leg to make up for the non-elimination leg! I wholeheartedly approve. Talk to you about it before Week Three!

Now It Can Be Told!

2011-09-30T19:55:00.000-07:00

1969. The offices of Marvel Comics.

STAN: So, Jack...we've built up the Marvel brand, established ourselves as an exciting new comics line for adults as well as children, and created some iconic characters that will stand the test of time. I think it's time we dealt with our major competitors.

JACK: Walt Disney?

STAN: No, I think our plans for Disney will have to be...longer term. No, I was referring to DC. Their brands continue to be more recognizable than ours, and their reinventions of classic Golden Age characters are proving to be dangerously popular. I think it's time to crush them. Are you ready to implement "Plan Poison Pill"?

JACK: The alliteration thing, Stan? It's got to stop. It's become a sickness.

STAN: I don't know what you're talking about, my astonishing artist of pencil-pushing perfection! My magnificent mind is every bit as alert as an amazing aardvark, and my brain is bursting with brilliant bideas bat brush balefully babble bubble **slaps self** You're right, Jack. But I only have to hold it together for a few more years before I can pass the editorial reins on to my disciples. And we won't have to worry about competitors, not if you're willing to do your part.

JACK: My part? I've been working on every book we publish for almost a decade, Stan. I've strip-mined my imagination for every sellable concept I ever came up with, from the Fantastic Four to the X-Men to Captain America. We even threw in Toomazooma the Living Totem, Stan! Let's face it...I can't come up with another best-selling idea.

STAN: I know, Jack. That's not what I'm asking you to do. What I'm asking you to do is far more sinister, far more devious...a plan that will cripple DC for decades to come. I want you to defect, Jack.

JACK: Defect? But they'll never--

STAN: Of course they will. We stage a falling out. Some nonsense over money, we'll funnel your royalties through Swiss bank accounts for a while. You'll decide to look for a better deal elsewhere, and who better than our major competitor? And then...

JACK: And then what? I write their titles? I don't exactly think that's going to cripple them, Stan. Not unless your plan is to have them trip on piles of money.

STAN: Oh, you'll make them money. That was never in question. But it's what else you'll do to them that interests me. Remember those "New Gods" ideas you had? The ones we agreed were cool but uncommercial?

JACK: ...I think I see where you're going with this one, Stan. You want me to introduce them into the DC Universe.

STAN: Exactly! They'll never sell, but DC's writers and editors will be fascinated by them! They'll keep trying to launch them and relaunch them, make them the centerpiece of their mythos, maybe even launch a gigantic company-wide crossover based on them! But they'll never be anything more than a cult phenomenon. DC will slowly sink into obscurity trying to make them popular, while we will rise to the heights of popularity!

JACK: And I get to finally write all the characters we thought were too crazy to publish! Kamandi, the Forever People, Mister Miracle, Glorious Godfrey, Granny Goodness, Devil Dinosaur--

STAN: Wait. Let's hang on to that last one. I kind of like the sound of it.

JACK: Seriously, Stan. Get help.

Self-Taught Superheroes, Part Eleven

2011-09-26T22:22:00.000-07:00

Surprise doesn't take long, when your mind moves at superhuman speeds. Shock takes a little longer, though. When I got ambushed by two gangs of Lord Raptor's mercenaries, each one about eight people strong, each one equipped by a wide-beam stun projector that pretty much negated my speed advantage, I just stood there for a long moment in stunned panic. The alert sirens blared, Lord Raptor's men shouted, and I felt the panic stretch out into an eternity.

Somewhere at the end of that eternity, I realized that they were shouting at each other. I also realized that the alarms weren't about me.

Obviously, I wondered what they were about, but now that the shock was over, I was back in the zone. I broke right, sprinting headlong down the corridor towards the first group of thugs and diving into a skid as they finally realized that they needed to keep their attention less on the new situation and more on the superhero right in front of them. They blasted the stun projector over my head just as I grabbed the ankle of the guy holding it and dragged him backwards into his buddies. They went over into each other in a tangle of limbs, and I'm not ashamed to say I bounced a few heads off of the floors to make sure they didn't get up.

I looked down to the other end of the corridor, hoping I might see a group of semi-conscious mercs at the other end, but no such luck. The armor they wore protected them against their own weapons. They'd shrugged off the stun blasts easily...

...and at hummingbird speed, I had just managed to get the chestplate off of the lead soldier and duck behind it when they got their first shot off.

To the soldiers at the other end of the hallway, it probably seemed like they were fighting under a strobe light. The stun cannon fired so rapidly it lit up the hallway almost twenty times a second, but even on full auto, that left me plenty of time to pop up and run about five steps before I had to duck behind my improvised shield. The strobe effect probably made it seem like I moved even faster; I could see the expression of sheer terror on the face of the trooper holding the gun just before I kicked it out of his hands and laid into them.

A few seconds after that, and it was all over. Mind you, I was sweating like a pig and craving Kool-Aid so bad I could almost taste Sharkleberries, but I had taken out sixteen full-grown battle-hardened mercenaries with my bare hands. My adrenalin was pumping like a freaking beast.

I went for the door, but my opener had stopped working. So I grabbed one from an unconscious soldier. On further thought, I grabbed them all. Even if I didn't need them, I figured that was sixteen guys who weren't going anywhere soon.

Every few minutes, I had to track down a new goon to get a fresh one, but I really felt like I was making progress. There weren't nearly as many soldiers, and the ones that I did bump into seemed distracted and panicky, easy to evade. After a while, I started following them just to see what the fuss was about.

Pretty soon, I found out. A squad I was following charged through a bulkhead that slammed shut behind them. I heard the zap of stun projectors, a bone-jarring crunch that was like no sound I'd ever heard in a fight, the crash of metal hitting metal. Then silence. I ventured towards the door cautiously, uncertain of what might be on the other side...and then I found out.

The bone-rattling thud sounded again. Then a third time. The door began to buckle under titanic strain, its surface bulging suddenly with each blow. Finally, it crumpled completely and a man stepped over it to face me.

And that was how I met Captain Light.

TO BE CONTINUED...

Storytelling Engines: Web of Spider-Man

2011-09-24T20:06:00.000-07:00

(or "Spider-Man, Part Four")

When you read the first eighteen or so issues of "Web of Spider-Man", there's a very real sense that this is a title in search of a direction. You can hear the different writers (and there was something of a revolving-door creative team at the time, as writers shuffled off of other Spidey books and onto "Web") struggling to find out what makes this Spider-Man series unique, what sets it apart from the other titles featuring Peter Parker and makes it a series that people will buy for its own sake.

It's really about half-way through that they seem to figure out the answer to that is, "Nothing much, really."

This isn't to say that the series is bad by any stretch of the imagination. There are a couple of issues in there that I would probably put up in the first tier of all-time Spider-Man stories (there's a great one where Peter finally gets fed up with Jonah's harassment of him in print and gets ready to beat him to within an inch of his life.) There are good Spidey stories, indifferent Spidey stories, goofy Spidey stories (Peter gets arrested on a vagrancy charge and winds up in a "Most Dangerous Game" pastiche...) But there's nothing that couldn't have been told in any of the other books. New villains like the Vulturians, old villains like Doc Ock, these are all the kinds of stories anyone could tell in any Spider-Man book. It uses the exact same storytelling engine as "Amazing", which in turn uses the exact same storytelling engine as "Spectacular".

And you know what? That's okay. It's okay because Spider-Man is one of those characters with a particularly amaz...um, spect...well-designed storytelling engine, one that generates large numbers of stories very easily. His supporting cast is large and interesting in its own right and can sustain lots of subplots, his job and his personal life provide him with lots of entry points into new stories, and he has a wide and varied Rogues Gallery that can easily hold an audience's interest over multiple appearances. This storytelling engine is so good that it can generate three good story ideas a month without any real difficulty, and the character is popular enough that there is a demand for three Spider-Man stories a month.

Although not exactly equal demand; for some reason, despite offering plenty of good stories, and plenty of crossovers and tie-ins, "Spectacular" and "Web of Spider-Man" never had quite the same level of sales as "Amazing". Which is why, eventually, they just decided to start publishing "Amazing" three times a month. Different titles, but the principle is pretty much the same...the more Spider-Man audiences get, the happier they are.

And because it's Spider-Man and not, say, Brother Voodoo, we're just fine with that.

Sef-Taught Superheroes, Part Ten

2011-09-21T21:27:00.001-07:00

My dream kind of skipped ahead to the point where I got caught.

In real life, it didn't happen right away. In real life, I managed to shift some of the sacks of rice around to the point where I could make a little bit of space for myself to squeeze into (I'm not actually very big. Like I said, I think I've probably got one more growth spurt in me. Either that, or I'm always going to wind up with a reputation as a dirty fighter solely because enemy groins are actually closer than their chins.) Lord Raptor's men unloaded the goods with the kind of bored, passive indifference you might expect from people who were hardened mercenaries dealing with non-threatening groceries, and left me in the pantry.

I pulled myself out of the rice as soon as they left. I figured they were probably leaving the putting away of the food for the actual kitchen staff, and I didn't want to hang around while someone put each bag of rice on the shelf and noticed the toy surprise at the bottom. I slunk over to the door, keeping an eye out for security cameras the entire way...and the door didn't open.

That was a little awkward, to say the least. Although superhuman reflexes did save me from smacking headlong into it.

After a few seconds of examination, I found the electric eye located alongside the door, and it didn't take a genius to figure out that Lord Raptor's men had some kind of device to open it. It was actually a really good idea; even if someone did get into the base, they'd have no way of moving from room to room without an escort, while Lord Raptor could maneuver troops around freely. It was the kind of detailed, extremely significant intelligence on Lord Raptor's operations that I really wished I'd known before I snuck into their base.

Then the door opened. I'm not sure who looked more startled, me or the guy staring at me.

He didn't stay startled for long, though. One of his hands was already reaching for his belt when I grabbed it and dropped my hips into a throw that sent him sliding into a few dozen cartons of eggs. (Jujitsu. Seven point six minutes, seven hundred ninety-six in the Dewey Decimal System. Time well spent, I think.) Because I didn't stay startled for long either. I covered the distance between us in a sprint that would have made Usain Bolt slink away in shame and converted my momentum into a kick that had very little mass, but lots of velocity. The mercenary's eyes rolled back in his head and he slumped into unconsciousness.

I searched him for anything I could find that looked like it might be a door opener. Took me a couple minutes, but I found what I was looking for. After that, it was off into the rest of the base. That was about when I realized just how stupid I really was when I came up with my plan. The base was huge, with miles of featureless corridors and no maps to be seen anywhere. Probably Lord Raptor's men drilled for ages to learn where the barracks were and how to find your way to the bathrooms and stuff, but I didn't know where I was going even if I knew how to get there, which I didn't. And of course, I was wearing a bright green and white outfit with a red mask covering my mouth. I could not have stood out more if I'd actually been wearing the cheerleader outfit I was dreaming about.

And I didn't know it was even worse than that. The doors were linked to a central computer system, and each door opener had its own unique serial code. As far as the computer was concerned, Raptor Soldier #97681 had just wandered away from his station and was taking an erratic walking tour of the entire base. Took them about ten minutes to decide to go after me and about thirty seconds to find me after that. Well, that's just a guess--it's not like they gave me their split time or anything--but given that they could track my exact location every time I went into a room, I figure it wasn't exactly hard for them.

Which was right where my dream jumped to. Me, in the middle of what seemed like endless featureless corridors that branched onto endless featureless corridors, suddenly finding herself trapped between two groups of soldiers wearing stun cannons.

That's when the alert sirens went off.

TO BE CONTINUED...

Empire Strikes Back Love Must Stop!

2011-09-20T07:24:00.000-07:00

So I decided to indulge my love/hate relationship with John Scalzi's opinion pieces this morning by reading a column he did for Film Critic on how Ripley's status as the preeminent female character is as much due to the dearth of genuinely well-written female characters as it is due to Ripley being awesome, well-written, and well-acted. (I also decided to indulge my love of starting a blog post with "So I...", which I try not to do so much anymore.)

And what do I find? Apart from an actually extremely well-written essay about the way that even the "strong female characters" in sci-fi and fantasy are really just male fantasy figures, only nowadays they can kick people's ass, that is. I find this quote: "Some distance behind Sarah Connor is Princess Leia, who looks great on paper (a senator at 19! Leader of the rebellion! Feisty with Han Solo!) but who is woefully underwritten in every film she's in except The Empire Strikes Back and who isn't the focus of the series in any event."

So let me get this straight. When Princess Leia was risking her life by covertly spying for the Rebel Alliance, when she withstood brutal interrogation and truth drugs, when she cunningly stalled for time by "confessing" false information under duress, when she single-handedly took charge of her own rescue and shot her way out using someone else's blaster, then planned her own escape route, then deduced that the rescue was too easy and that they needed to act as though they were on a timetable...that was the "woefully underwritten" Leia.

When she got dragged around like a sack of potatoes by Big Strong Man Han Solo, when she carped and whined about every decision Han made only to be proven wrong at every turn because Han knows better about such things than a silly little girl, when she got forcibly kissed by Han only to swoon into his arms because all a woman really needs is a take-charge man who knows what he wants in the bedroom, when she hung out in her room changing her outfits and doing her hair and leaves Han and Chewie to make sure the Falcon gets repaired and C-3P0 gets found, when her primary contribution of the entire movie was to have a sudden "female intuition" that Luke is in danger...that's the strong female character who almost competes with Ripley.

This is how badly fan opinion has ossified in regards to the Star Wars trilogy. Even on a level where one movie is blatantly, demonstrably, provably superior to the other, even when a respected and devastatingly brilliant sci-fi writer like Jeanne Cavelos has already published a scathing essay pointing out how obvious it is that Leia becomes less and less feminist as the series progresses (my comments above owe a great debt to said essay, BTW)...we still get a token, "Empire is the best movie" thrown in there. Because it's just the Truth now, and facts only get in the way.

And since there are no comments on that column, I have to rant about it here and hope he sees it. Hey, it worked once before...

My New Fan Campaign (Football, Not Comics)

2011-09-19T19:01:00.000-07:00

For those of you who may not know, I'm actually something of a fan of football. Not rabidly so--this weekend's football did not, for example, take priority over a trip to the zoo with my sisters and our kids--but I do enjoy the game. And even though I'm a Minnesotan and hence a Vikings fan, I appreciate good football no matter who plays it. (Unless they're the Cowboys, but thankfully I haven't had to worry about them playing good football in a while.)

And as a result, I've been paying more than a little attention this year to the Indianapolis Colts. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the team, they have had a long run of dominance in their division and frequent trips deep into the playoffs (and a Superbowl win.) But this year, quarterback Peyton Manning, after a long streak of consecutive appearances that threatened to someday eclipse Brett Favre's record, suffered a neck injury and has not been able to play. In his first two games out since his rookie start, the Colts have suffered humiliatingly large losses to the Houston Texans (who they used to regularly dominate) and the Cleveland Browns (a perennial cellar-dweller team.) Replacement QB Kerry Collins has looked utterly overmatched.

Which is why I'm proposing a fan campaign to nominate Peyton Manning as this year's NFL MVP.

Think about it. The Most Valuable Player is the player that makes the most difference to the team, and clearly, this year Peyton Manning is demonstrating that he is the one thing that stands between year after year of double-digit wins and playoff appearances...and losses to the Texans and Browns. Who better to be the MVP of the league?

Next week, the Colts are playing the Steelers. Tune in for the next chapter in the saga of Peyton Manning, future MVP!

Self-Taught Superheroes, Part Nine

2011-09-12T20:35:00.001-07:00

One of the things they never really tell you about being a superhero is how boring it gets.

I know, not exactly the best way to begin another installment of my wild superheroic adventures, right? But it's true. When Batman or Spider-Man go out "on patrol", they always run into power-mad supervillains or rampaging monsters or cosmic weirdness. At the very least, they get to whale on some muggers or rapists. But you don't really hear much about the issue where Spider-Man wanders around the city all night and doesn't see anybody and he finds out the next day on the news that a burglary happened six blocks away from him and he missed it.

All of which is by way of pointing out that when I was asleep, my subconscious compressed about six weeks of patrolling and dullness and really minor crimes into a sort of weird jumble that felt like it took no time at all, and it was already the next time I fought Lord Raptor's men. Which, believe it or not, happened at the supermarket.

I mean, in retrospect, it kind of makes sense. You're feeding a small army of mercenaries, you're trying to keep from establishing any kind of paper trail that would lead back to you, and you have no scruples about stealing...of course you're going to raid supermarkets for supplies. It was the Lord Raptor way of doing things, really. Never buy what you can take. And lucky me, I just happened to be out picking up dinner at the exact store they attacked. (Dinner...and twinkies. And Kool-Aid. And pixie stix. My pixie stix budget is roughly a hundred bucks a month.)

The first sign was the sound of stun cannons. They make a sound that you'll never forget once you hear it, a sort of cross between a bass string twanging and an elephant getting a suppository. The second I heard it, I knew. I raced into the women's room, pulled on my costume...

But one of the nice things about experiencing the world in "hummingbird time" is that you have a good long chance to think things over in a crisis. And what I thought about was the fact that Lord Raptor had a lot of men. And a lot of ships, too. Stopping these guys from raiding this supermarket would just mean a half-dozen guys who went to jail for about a week before they got broken out, and maybe Lord Raptor would go hungry for a few days until he went and raided a supermarket where I wasn't. And I'd be spending weeks waiting to be in the right place at the right time. I had to come up with a better plan than that.

So instead of beating up Lord Raptor's thugs, I sprinted down the aisles, darted across the checkout counters during the split-seconds when Lord Raptor's men were distracted by a would-be hero who wound up with thirteen stitches across his chin where he hit the floor after falling asleep in mid-stride, used the pallets that Lord Raptor's men were already loading as cover, flung myself into the cargo hold, and ducked behind a stack of industrial-size jars of barbecue sauce. It took me about two seconds.

I should mention that one of the lousy things about experiencing the world in "hummingbird time" is that I'm impulsive and prone to making decisions that I regret much faster than an ordinary person is capable of. But by then, it was too late; a huge pallet of uncooked rice got shoved in next to me, and I didn't really have any choice but to stay where I was while they loaded the rest of the cargo bay and took off.

In "hummingbird time", I had roughly the equivalent of six weeks to think of a plan for what to do when they unloaded all this stuff and saw me.

TO BE CONTINUED...

Awesome Team-Ups I Want To See, Volume X

2011-09-10T19:48:00.000-07:00

The "Criminal Minds" team heads to Gotham.

Think about it. Garcia and Oracle would totally make bestest cyber-buds, Reid and Tim Drake could work together to solve a mystery, Morgan and Nightwing would go out and kick ass together, and Hotch and Bruce can have a chin-measuring competition. And of course, depending on which season you set it in, either Gideon or Rossi would sit down with Alfred and have an incredibly interesting and illuminating conversation about Batman's psychology. (Still not sure who Greenaway would work with. Maybe Huntress? It seems like a good fit...) J.J., of course, would be working with Commissioner Gordon. (Supposedly, the writers of "Criminal Minds" structured the entire thing as a metaphor for the Knights of the Round Table. I think that the Batman mythos are an even better fit, though.)

And naturally, they'd be up against a whole freaking Rogues Gallery of Batman's foes. (The comment that inspired it all came from my lovely wife, who pictured Gideon describing the Joker from 'The Dark Knight' as "an organized serial killer whose M.O. is pretending to be disorganized.") The Riddler, the Mad Hatter, Zsasz, Scarecrow...seriously, why is someone not making this right now?

Who am I kidding, I'm saying this on the Internet. I could probably get twenty thousand hits searching for the fanfiction alone.

Self-Taught Superheroes, Part Eight

2011-09-07T21:39:00.000-07:00

(Apologies for the delay...last week just kind of disappeared on me. 57-hour, six-day workweeks will do that to you...)

In my dream, I felt just like I did when it all happened. The excitement, the exhilaration...fear kind of got mixed in there, too, because I knew it wasn't a game--the guys I was fighting had real guns and they were really trying to hurt me. Maybe even kill me. But the feeling that surged through me that first time was confidence. I was out there, fighting bad guys with my brand-new superpowers, and I realized right away that I had a knack for it. As soon as I put on that costume, I knew I could do this.

Of course, in my dream, the costume was Buffy the Vampire Slayer's cheerleading outfit from Sunnydale High. But in my dream, that made perfect sense.

I caught up with my very first bad guys outside of a chemical supply warehouse in downtown Cleveland. They weren't hard to spot, really; they'd landed in a giant airship that looked like what you might get if a vulture and a helicopter had ugly little babies, marched out, and shot the security guards with stun cannons. Half the group was holding the police at bay, and the other half was looting the warehouse. And me? I was running there at a good sixty mile-an-hour clip. (I think if I get another growth spurt, I might be able to do ninety, but right now my legs just aren't long enough.)

(I also think that I didn't really have blue sparks shooting out from under my feet whenever I took a turn, but I did in the dream. And it was awesome!)

I heard about it from my dad. Not that he had connections in the law enforcement community or anything; he just was on the phone to the warehouse placing an order when it all happened. I was in the lab for a check-up; he does monthly check-ups with me ever since he gave me the serum, about nine months ago. (It's weird, the way so many things started happening "about nine months ago"...that was when my dad cracked the cure for my chronic fatigue syndrome, that was when Captain Light made his first appearance, that was when Shining Dragon Fist left her monastery...I'm not a big believer in "fate" or anything, but nine months ago was like a sort of starter's gun to the new crazy world we live in.)

Oh, and nine months ago was when Lord Raptor's men began stealing stuff. Big, bold, crazy robberies, done from VTOL airships in a pattern that nobody seemed to be able to spot. They must have been around before then, of course; you don't assemble that kind of manpower and equipment and a gigantic hidden fortress from which you plan to hold the world's capitals hostage all overnight. (Ooh, spoilers!) But nine months ago was when they went public.

And eight months ago, they robbed a warehouse in Cleveland and I heard my dad talking about it on the phone, telling his friends to stay hidden and let the bad guys take whatever they wanted. And I thought about my costume, hidden in my room, and about the news stories I'd been reading about the mystery flying man in Chicago who fought crime...and I knew what I was going to do. I ran back home, changed into costume, and sprinted for the warehouse.

Along the way, I stopped for a few minutes at the local library to learn kung fu.

And when I got to the warehouse, I put it into practice. It was incredible. The bad guys looked like they were moving in slow motion. I could actually see the energy blasts coming out of the cannon, and I could even dodge them. I hit one guy with a sweep kick, popped back up while he was still mid-fall, and elbowed him in the chest before he hit the ground. Their body armor stopped some of it, of course, but I was actually kicking butt! Me, a sixteen year-old girl who used to have a permanent excuse letter from gym class, beating up genuine evil mercenaries with guns!

Liam Neeson didn't really tell me what a good job I was doing, though. That was just in the dream again. (It was Liam Neeson from 'Batman Begins', by the way, not Liam Neeson from 'Phantom Menace' or Liam Neeson from 'Krull' or Liam Neeson from 'Darkman'. Although weirdly enough, later in the dream it was Liam Neeson from 'Clash of the Titans'.)

The problem was, there were a lot of them and they'd already gotten most of what they were after by the time I got there. Their leader--he had red shoulderpads--gave the order to evacuate, and a few guys stayed behind to keep me busy while their ship took off. I kind of made the guys regret their career choice, though.

In real life, lots more stuff happened after that. But in the dream, it only took about five minutes before I fought Lord Raptor's men again...

TO BE CONTINUED...

Storytelling Engines: Trial of the Flash

2011-08-29T19:47:00.000-07:00

(or "Central City Law")

"Now hold on just a minute!" I hear you say, even before I begin my introduction. (Which I'm fine with, because we've been through a lot together, you and I.) "I've been willing to read about anthologies as storytelling engines, I've been willing to read about histories as storytelling engines--I even went along with you on 'The Official Handbook to the Marvel Universe', for cripes sakes!" (It's so charming that you don't swear on my blog.) "But 'The Trial of the Flash' isn't a storytelling engine, it's just a freaking story! A long story, but a story nonetheless!"

But then I hand you the thick, 500+ page collection of the 'Trial of the Flash' storyline. You read the whole thing. At last, you hand it back to me. "Okay," you say. "I think I see where you're going with this."

Because in actual fact, the trial of the Flash isn't just one story. It's a whole status quo for the series, with new supporting characters (the Flash's sexy new lawyer), new antagonists (Big Sir, the grandstanding D.A., the shady lawyer who's determined to get the Flash as his client)...and a new motivation and purpose to the series. The Flash is now a character under suspicion of murder, not a civic hero. How does this change the way people react to him? How do his villains view this now-clouded character? How do his parents, his friends, his ex-fiancee react? The setting of the courtroom, the conceptual setting of being on trial, becomes fertile ground to plant the seeds of multiple storylines.

Obviously, this is a concept that has roots; at any given time, you can flip the channel to a legal show of some kind. "Perry Mason", "LA Law", "Law and Order", "JAG", "The Defenders"...we are fascinated by the law and the criminal justice system. There is endless potential for drama involved, the stakes are frequently life and death, and the fate of a person can depend on skilled, moving rhetoric--exactly the kind of thing a good writer should excel at. The idea of a superhero series that is also a law drama should be bona fide gripping drama.

So why was 'Trial of the Flash' so unpopular at the time that it led to the cancellation of the series and the death of the character in 'Crisis on Infinite Earths'? (Spoilers, sorry.)

There are a couple of reasons. The first is that it is, like much of the late Bronze Age at DC, tinged with just enough silliness to make it seem corny, and just enough painful earnestness and attempts at mimicking Marvel's darker, more introspective characters to take the joy out of it. (There is a reason that DC decided to completely revamp its entire fictional universe at about this time, after all.) Characters like Big Sir are irritating and unwelcome, the attempts at turning this into a serious legal drama merely highlight how utterly comic-booky the whole thing is (Bob Ingersoll kept up a running commentary in his column at the time on the sheer number of major, trial-derailing legal mistakes the series made. It's worth tracking down.) And the conclusion is a ham-fisted attempt to shoehorn a happy ending into the story...and series...when the decision had already been made to bump off the character in another book.

But that's not why it was unpopular. It was unpopular because it was a false status quo.

When a trial begins, everyone knows that it has to end. The law finds the defendant guilty or innocent, they either go to jail or go free, and everyone moves on. Law series don't spend a whole season on one case; they get to the verdict, usually within an hour. When you announce that there will be a "trial of the Flash", people don't want to see how he copes with the pressure of being in the public eye or what the latest legal maneuver will be, they want to see whether he's guilty or not. And every issue where you don't reveal that verdict is an issue where people get a little more impatient. Doing a full two-year long trial almost in real time becomes a recipe for frustration, particularly in a pre-"decompression" era. It's this frustration that comes out in the reviews of the era, and it's this frustration that's probably the reason why we won't see an experiment like the trial of the Flash carried out again soon.

Or maybe we will. If Teen Iron Man has taught us anything, it's that writers will try anything.

Self-Taught Superheroes, Part Seven

2011-08-28T11:45:00.000-07:00

Things got a little bit crazy about then.

No, not crazy. The other thing. Crazier.

Because when the blue-skinned girl did something that I think you'd have to be a telepath to understand, it wasn't just Captain Light that got back up. It was everyone. She undid whatever Mister Meme did to their minds, and she healed their physical injuries, and she even untied them telekinetically. And suddenly it wasn't a handful of desperate superheroes against a horde of supervillains, it was our team against their team. And we have a big team.

You do not know "crazy" until you've been in a really big full-scale super-on-super melee. You're switching off opponents every few seconds because one of their guys comes at you from behind while you're fighting another one of their guys and just when you're starting to have trouble fighting two enemies at a time, then one of your teammates breaks free of their fight and knocks one of your opponent halfway across the room, where they promptly get up and just start whaling on whoever happens to be closest. And then you put your guy down and look around for someone to fight just in time to see some guy that you thought your best friend knocked out getting up for more.

And everyone's going nuts with their powers. I'm just fast and agile, but Stormcrow was literally the eye of a hurricane. An actual hurricane in the middle of our conference room. And while our conference room is big, a hurricane makes it seem a lot smaller. Freezing rain was pouring onto every flat surface, people were slipping and sliding, lightning bolts were zapping out all over the place--it was a lot more comfortable for us than for the bad guys, because Stormcrow has really good control of her powers, but I was still soaked to the skin for the second time today.

And vines were tangling around supervillains and smacking them into walls, and Neutrino Man had caused some sort of a minor runaway nuclear reaction in the corner that was flash-boiling the freezing rain into radioactive steam that was choking a bunch of bad guys (he swears blind that it's quick-dissipating and has no long-term side effects. This. Worries. Me.) And laser blasts flew through the air and projectile darts launched at people and got swept up in the hurricane and wound up hitting entirely other people and anyone who wasn't otherwise occupied was kicking or punching or stabbing or hovering in the middle of the room thinking really hard...

And in the center of it all, Regent and Captain Light were duking it out. Regent launched a punch that would have knocked my head clean off its shoulders and halfway down the hall, and Captain Light didn't even flinch. The impact sounded like another thunderclap in the din, but Captain Light just smiled.

Then he punched back. The whole room lit up with a blinding flash as Captain Light's energy field interacted with Regent's force field in a way that neither one of them expected. Regent went backwards into the wall hard enough to embed itself in it, and Captain Light...didn't move. But his whole costume was covered in soot and it smoldered in places until the rain put it out.

"Enough of this," Regent said. He pried himself out of the wall and touched his left wrist with his right. A door opened in the air. "You have forced my hand further, Captain. When next we meet, I will have to take stronger measures to carve this cancerous notion out of the world I am destined to rule."

Captain Light started towards him, but Silver Rage blocked his path. The statue's grip prevented him from flying further. "Destiny is just what we make it," he said, fighting to free himself in time to stop Regent's escape. "You might be powerful, but that doesn't make you better than anybody else."

Regent chuckled. It was a soft sound, but it somehow carried over the wall of noise. "You don't know anything, do you? I am Regent, one of the Lost Monarchs of the Shadow Histories, and I will reclaim what is mine. And next time, I will not be so merciful." And with that, he stepped through the door and vanished.

After that, it was just a matter of mop-up. A lot of mop-up, but mop-up nonetheless. We beat the bad guys that didn't make a run for it when they saw their leader vanish, we dumped them in the hands of local law enforcement, I had something like a gallon of Purplesaurus Rex Kool-Aid (ever since I got my powers, I have been absolutely addicted to sugary drinks. At least they're cheap.) And then I realized just how tired I was, and I practically collapsed onto my bed to sleep.

And I dreamed about how it all started...

TO BE CONTINUED...

Review: Soulless

2011-08-21T20:36:00.000-07:00

I'm a little late to extol the virtues of "Soulless", by Gail Carriger, given that she's already got something like three sequels published and is almost finished with a five-volume cycle of novels about protagonist Alexia Tarabotti (called "The Parasol Protectorate")...but it's just so damn refreshing these days to read a sci-fi fantasy novel that doesn't make me want to break out the red pen and edit the book into something readable that I feel like I have to tell people about it. "Soulless" is genuinely fun, a charming and light-hearted read that will leave you wanting to read passages out loud to random passers-by, and it's also an inventive spin on the oh-look-it's-werewolves-and-vampires-again genre, this time with a steampunk twist. (Everyone always does werewolves and vampires. Someday, I will write my novel about the ancient and epic rivalry between mummies and Frankenstein's monsters.)

The novel focuses, unsurprisingly for something that bills itself as "An Alexia Tarabotti novel", on Alexia Tarabotti, an outspoken Victorian woman who was born without a soul. This doesn't seem to inconvenience her ethics, emotions, or principles, but it does mean that she involuntarily renders any vampire or werewolf that touches her back into mortal form for as long as she holds onto them. This makes her a "person of interest" to the werewolves and vampires of London, who are entirely too civilized to eliminate her as a threat to their very existences, but definitely sensible enough to want to keep an eye on her. As such, she finds herself embroiled in intrigue, as well as in a romance with the Alpha of the London werewolf pack.

This romance is actually one of the best parts of the novel. It's charming in that "Jane Austen's 'Emma'" sort of way, but Gail Carriger is the kind of writer who very proudly and openly acknowledges that romance generally leads to sex. The characters in this novel are grown-ups, they have naughty bits, and they enjoy using them. I am a big fan of sex-positive attitudes in literature, I always feel like there are far too many writers who disdain talking about what their characters do in the bedroom (because who could possibly be interested in that?) and so a writer who not only writes sex scenes, but does them extremely well, is a rarity to be treasured.

Apart from that, though, the novel has plenty of humor, an interesting plot that draws you on, a lead character who is sensible and funny and independent, a guest appearance by Queen Victoria, and almost enough dirigibles. (According to the interview with the author at the end, the regrettable lack of actual dirigible travel will be rectified in the sequels.) I'd say more, but the horrid thing about good reviews is that you don't want to reveal too much. With a bad review, you want to explain every grim detail to warn the reader away, but a book like "Soulless" begs to be experienced rather than explained. So go read it. You'll enjoy it immensely.

Self-Taught Superheroes, Part Six

2011-08-17T21:52:00.000-07:00

The blue girl looked around. The room was filled with madmen, monsters, killer robots, living statues...an entire team of supervillains, assembled by the arch-nemesis we didn't even know we had, Regent. Us heroes? Most of us were down on the ground, tied up and unconscious to prevent them from killing themselves. The survivors were bruised, bloody, and about as beaten as we could get without being actually beaten. But for a moment, all of it paused as we waited in stunned silence for her to explain her sudden appearance.

"Wait, don't tell me," she said. "I have a test on this next week..."

Yeah. That didn't exactly break the stunned silence.

"Okay," she continued, "the guy in purple and gold is Regent, that's obvious. The girl on one knee next to him is, um...Hummingbird, and the robot in the corner...is that the Doomsday Clock? Shoot, I can't remember now. I think the girl with the knives is Stabbily Ever After, but I don't know for sure because duh, you can't draw her picture, and they're fighting, um...Feeral? No, wait, Saavij."

She continued pointing at us, one by one. "And that's Captain Light on the floor and Gunmetal Grey standing over him and Silver Rage with the axe next to him and, and, um...no, wait, don't tell me...oh, it's right on the tip of my tongue...Bloodcalled! Wow. I've never seen a real vampire, not since they all went to the Black Nebula in 2754. I thought she'd be paler. And--"

Regent interrupted. "A time traveler," he said. "Interesting." He gestured towards the fox-woman fighting John Q. Public. "Vulpine, subdue her. Not too much damage, please. She has valuable intelligence for us." The beast pulled away from John, her teeth scraping grooves into his baseball bat as she lunged backwards, then she turned and leapt for the blue girl...

And gently glided to a halt in mid-air. "Oh, come on," the blue girl said, as Vulpine flailed helplessly in a vain attempt to gain momentum. "I'm flunking history, not telekinetics. I thought you were supposed to be some kind of master strategist or something?"

Regent nodded his head graciously. "Part of a master strategy involves gaining intelligence through the effective use of feints and gambits. For example, I know that you are overconfident, not easily vulnerable to physical force...and thus I change my tactics. Meme?" He gestured to the teleporter. "Share your understanding with her."

I raced across the room, hoping to knock Mister Meme out before he could work his crazy death-wish mojo on our only chance for surviving all this (slim as it was...) But the cyborg woman dashed away from John Q. Public just as fast, dropping into a fighting stance right in front of me. "I want you to be aware that I'm not happy about this," she said, her words spilling out too fast for anyone but me to follow. "I view the state as nothing more than a tool of oppression against the masses, and Regent is really just another dictator. But he's a dictator who planted a small bomb next to my aorta, and there's really only so much you can do to bring about a new age of enlightenment and a freedom from the tyranny of government when you have a smoldering crater where your heart should be."

I launched a feint at her midsection in Serpent Style kung fu, then shifted stances and styles at the same time to aim a kick at her face in a Tae Kwon Do style. (I make up for my lack of depth in any one style by knowing a lot of them. It's kind of what happens when you have five minutes to kill, a stack of books on martial arts, and a reading speed that gets measured in pages per second.) I was gratified to see her head snap back with a sharp grunt of pain, but she wasn't down for the count. And I knew I probably had less than a second of real time before Meme did his thing.

The cyborg slashed at me with her knuckle claws, and I barely managed to avoid them. I'd never seen anyone as fast as her except me, and it was a close second. She launched a flurry of darts from a wrist-launcher, and I had to fling myself to the floor as they passed overhead to embed themselves harmlessly (I hoped) into Zombie Samurai. I got back up, but I could tell it was already too late. Meme's eyes had locked with the blue girl's...

And she laughed. "Oh, puh-lease!" she said. "Amateur hour is officially freaking over, pal. I'm already taking college credits in telepathy; did you really think a vat-grown one-trick pony like this was going to do anything?" She held up a finger, and Mister Meme slumped to the ground, unconscious. "He's all thud and blunder, no subtlety. Doesn't even know how to stop a simple Circadian reset."

She turned, glaring at Regent. "Honestly, if I hadn't also aced my 'Ethical Uses of Unusual Abilities' course, I'd peel you out of that armor and give you a good spanking. As it is, I'll settle for earning extra credit towards my major." She closed her eyes, and waves of invisible energy poured off of her like a heat haze.

Regent reached down and ripped a hunk out of the floor, hefting it with both hands. His earlier sang froid was clearly gone. "I don't know what you think you're doing," he said, "but I have no further patience for it. I'll--"

"You'll put that thing down," Captain Light said, slowly rising to his feet. His fists crackled with unearthly energies. "I know it's a cliche, but why don't you pick on someone your own size?"

TO BE CONTINUED...

How To Make Twilight Awesome

2011-08-14T16:13:00.000-07:00

I watched the Rifftrax of 'Twilight' last night, and while I could review the film itself, I think I know my reading audience well enough to be reasonably sure that you've all formed your opinions of the film/book/franchise already, and they're not good. (The only thing I think is directly worth mentioning is the lighting in the film. They chose a tonal palette of muted, wintery blue and green lighting that made the whole thing even more of an ordeal than it would have been already. I felt like I was watching the world's first movie shot entirely underwater.) But it did occur to me that the movie could actually have been very intense and intelligent if they'd made one small change...

It would have been actually pretty decent if Bella hadn't loved Edward.

I mean, I'm not telling anyone anything they don't already know when I say that Edward comes off as a creepy, domineering, borderline abusive stalker. He threatens her, he breaks into her room, he veers between wildly overprotective and actually endangering, he constantly talks about how he loves her so much that he wants to kill her...it's a non-stop Disturbing Behavior Festival, and you spend the whole movie wishing Bella would come to her senses and get a restraining order.

But what if that's exactly what she did? What if she really did recognize that Edward was downright dangerous, that his obsessive attraction to her was a threat to her life and safety, and that he really was a bloodthirsty monster whose tenuous self-control was the only thing that stood between her and a brutal death with an eternal unlife hungering for the blood of the living if she was "lucky"? What if, on realizing it, she then realized that there wasn't a whole hell of a lot she could do because getting someone involved was just signing their death warrant, and her only hope involved establishing an emotional connection with the Cullen family so they saw her as more than just a meal? You've already got the tension of "abusive boyfriend and girl who knows that nobody can help her", might as well make deliberate use of it instead of fighting it for your entire franchise.

A four-book series about a teenage girl trying desperately to stay on the good side of a group of barely-sane vampires, knowing that there's no hope for her if they take a mind to kill her, but needing to use them to keep her away from the even crazier vampires because apparently her super-power is being yummy? That might be readable.

If, y'know, someone else wrote it.

Self-Taught Superheroes, Part Five

2011-08-10T21:53:00.000-07:00

"It was Captain Light that forced my hand," Regent said, swatting John Q. Public halfway across the room with a casually dismissive gesture. He got back up--John had a knack for rolling with punches, and an absolute refusal to give up--but he was wobbly. A bipedal vulpine creature with red fur loped across the room in a single vicious lunge to take advantage of his momentary weakness.

"Before Captain Light, the heroes were merely...firefighters," he continued. "You ran around, you stopped villains where they arose and made threats of themselves, and you never thought that there might be someone who planned instead of simply rampaging." I raced in and aimed a rapid-fire punch at his mid-section, but my fist skidded off of an invisible energy field and slid off to the side, its momentum harmlessly dissipated.

In my peripheral vision, I saw Saavij backed into a corner by a humanoid robot wielding twin khopeshes. (I played lots of D&D, okay? I can tell you the names of lots of different medieval weapons.) Her long swords clashed in a blur against its wickedly-hooked ones, but reinforcements were already coming to the robot's aid. "But Captain Light...he had a vision. An idea. Under Captain Light, you became a movement. And movements are dangerous things."

"A movement, an idea...these spread from person to person. They unite them under a banner. Inevitably, you would learn of my existence, and you would oppose me. And this I could not bear." Goth Grrl's shadow had already enveloped her, transforming her body into a monstrous creature of living shadow, but she was duking it out with a raven-haired woman with glowing red eyes who was flinging around shadow bolts of her own. And an androgynous woman in a tuxedo who was flinging multi-colored blasts of burning smoke, and an armored man wielding a sword of pure flame...yeah, we were outnumbered pretty badly. At least two to one, now that most of our team was unconscious and suicidal.

"It has been said, of course, that you cannot kill an idea." As he spoke, Regent was punching back at me. I dodged--I was still a lot faster than him--but his misses shattered concrete where they landed. He only had to get lucky once. "The people who say that lack ambition and planning, though. The trick in killing an idea is catching it before it has time to breed."

Shining Dragon Fist's hands glowed bright with her inner qi, but the woman she fought had fists that seemed to absorb that light. The eyes that woman had...I couldn't let myself get distracted, but I'd seen eyes like that before. They were like Zombie Samurai's eyes. Dead eyes. "And so I planned," Regent said, drawing my attention back to the fight. "I knew that I was dealing with heroes, and heroes have weaknesses. Loyalty, integrity, decency...these are levers, for a man who knows how to move them."

Zombie Samurai was advancing on a ten-year old girl, his sword drawn. This would have bothered me a lot more if the little girl hadn't been holding a sophisticated rifle, taking chunks out of his dead flesh with each shot. One of them ricocheted off his steel-reinforced skull with a loud 'clang', and he staggered...but kept going. That was, until a squat, toad-like humanoid of indeterminate gender tackled him into the wall.

"And so I created a threat." Regent's fist whizzed past me, so hard I felt the breeze of its passage. "One that you would have to battle, because it was evil. One that attacked your friends, so that you would have to help them. One that stirred the anger and hatred you try so hard to resist, causing you to react without thinking. 'Mister Meme' was my Trojan Horse, softening you up for the kill."

Gunmetal Grey's steel fists clashed against an axe blade as he dueled a silver statue whose eyes blazed with an inhuman fury. His perpetually-morphing metal skin healed each nick and cut, but I could tell that it happened slower each time. "And now we move into endgame. You were already defeated before I even entered the field of battle, and your every action merely postpones the inevitable. Should you yield and swear fealty, even at this late hour, you will find me merciful...but I cannot allow you to oppose me."

I tried to focus on my own battle, as I kicked and thrust and swung punch after useless, ineffectual punch against the force field, but I couldn't ignore the others. Saavij was now matching her two swords against four enemy blades, desperately whirling them to block the twin daggers of another little girl. This one had a cold, terrifying smile and the gleam of madness in her eyes. John Q. Public had his bat shoved into the jaws of the fox-woman, which left him open to punch after spike-knuckled punch from a cyborg woman with a mohawk. Her fists were coming away bloody now, but he refused to cry out. All around me, everyone was fighting their hardest...and they were losing. We were losing--I caught a glancing blow to my shoulder that spun me around so hard I tumbled to the ground.

"Yield or die," Regent said. He'd never even raised his voice. "You are fighting a general who has won a thousand battles before your grandfathers were born. This moment was destined to happen. I have planned for every eventuality. Your only choice is whether to suffer in futility, or bow to a superior...force...?"

His voice trailed off as he heard the growing hum from the center of the room. The battles slowed, then stopped as we all looked up towards the wind that came from nowhere and went to nowhere. We all watched as the light grew from a glimmer so faint it was almost imaginary to an almost blinding radiance.

And then it faded, leaving a woman floating in the center of the room. Her skin was a rich, royal blue, contrasting vividly with her blonde hair. She wore a dress made out of some kind of slick plastic, and there was some kind of strange device on her wrist. She looked at us with a faintly confused smile on her face.

"Hi," she said. "I'm here to watch the first battle between Captain Light and Regent." She looked around at the semi-conscious heroes, the desperate grimaces of pain, the horde of villains. "Um...am I late?"

TO BE CONTINUED...

Storytelling Engines: Doc Savage

2011-08-06T11:37:00.000-07:00

(or "The Nazis Were Bad PR")

It's a little unusual, reading the 1970s comic-book adventures of Doc Savage and the Fabulous Five; the character and his gadgets, methods and sidekicks are more firmly rooted in the pulp traditions of the 1930s than perhaps any other pulp hero of the era. (Which is why it may not surprise you to note that the Doc Savage doesn't even try to update the character, setting him instead in his own time.) The Shadow, the Spider, Zorro, Fantomas, Solomon Kane, Sailor Steve Costigan...they all have their pulp elements, and they've all made the transition to other media and endured the test of time (well, maybe not Sailor Steve Costigan...) But when you think of the elements that make up a "pulp hero", you ultimately wind up coming up with Doc Savage just as surely as if you're ticking off boxes on a checklist.

Pulp heroes tend to straddle the border between human and superhuman (Doc Savage has honed his physique and mind to the pinnacle of perfection with two hours of special exercises every day), they have elaborate near-futuristic gadgets (the Helldiver, the rapid-firers, the flying wing), they fight elaborate and outlandish foes (in the Doc Savage comics, he fights lizard-men, scientists who harness lightning, and fake pirate ghosts who work out of a high-tech mock pirate ship) and they work out of some sort of an elaborate secret lair (the 86th floor of the Empire State Building.) Even Doc's sidekicks are almost like "mini-pulp heroes" all their own, with one being a two-fisted chemist, another being a brilliant lawyer with a sword-cane, and so on. It almost feels like Dent took every single pulp trope and put them into the blender in an attempt to create a sort of pulp ubermensch.

Which is, in a nutshell, the problem with the character. He is portrayed, with absolutely no sense of irony, as a person who has improved mind and body to the point where he is considered by everyone in the series to be a sort of "superior being". Lesser characters question Doc's decisions briefly, if at all, before seeing that they're in the presence of a blond, bronzed superman who's smarter than they are and has superior judgment. The Fabulous Five accept his every word without question. Only Pat Savage, Doc's cousin and a superwoman in her own right, is allowed to suggest that he might be wrong about anything (usually about not letting her tag along.) He is every inch Nietzsche's ubermensch...

And that's a philosophy that hasn't aged well. The association with the Nazi regime served to highlight the uncomfortable truth at the heart of Nietzsche's ideas: It's very easy for anyone at all to decide that they are superior, have a higher moral understanding than others, and should not be subject to the rules set by "lesser beings". Every sociopath believes himself to be an ubermensch, and every murder improves the world in their eyes by removing those believed to be beneath contempt. (This is also the Republican economic philosophy, I believe...)

Doc Savage kidnaps criminals and lobotomizes them, he believes that women have no place doing dangerous jobs despite meeting women who are every bit as capable and competent as he is, and he ultimately accepts no input from anyone or anything other than his own moral compass. Generations of human experience have shown us that people like that are actually very dangerous and kind of creepy, something that limits the Doc Savage storytelling engine right from the get-go. Gadgets, sidekicks, and methods make a series, but it doesn't help if you suspect right off the bat that your main character isn't much better than the people he fights.

Self-Taught Superheroes, Part Four

2011-08-03T20:45:00.000-07:00

It's not easy, carrying a body.

It's even harder when the other person, the one who's holding them under the arms, is taller than you are by a good foot. My arms were aching from the effort of keeping the feet properly elevated. I was determined not to show the strain, though. We were two people on a mission. (Well, peopleish. I've got bird DNA, and Zombie Samurai's dead and still walking, but I think we technically qualify. Nobody knows the rules anymore. Not when we've got electric cat-women on our team.) Our team was depending on us. I just hoped I hadn't screwed everything up too bad.

I should probably clarify, the body we were carrying out wasn't dead. It was Mister Meme--I know, you probably guessed that one--and he was "just" unconscious. But I was still worried, because one of the things I've learned about being a superhero is that it's a lot harder to knock a person out than it looks on television. I've punched bad guys nine, ten times, as hard as I can, and all I've got for my troubles is a really pissed-off bad guy who's spitting teeth. And I'm not proud of it, but I've sent some guys to the hospital when I was just trying to subdue them. Mister Meme was unconscious. That could mean concussion, skull fractures, maybe never waking up. We couldn't afford that.

That was what was going through my head. On the surface, I was trying to remain calm and collected. I had to. I'd told Zombie Samurai that all this was part of my plan. "We need to get him back to our headquarters," I'd said, "and we can't afford to risk moving him through the city with his powers. Every human being is a potential hostage. We get him back to base fully neutralized, we take stock of the situation, and we do whatever we have to in order to make him fix our friends."

That was what I told him. But he looked at me with those eyes...dead eyes. Killer's eyes. And I knew he knew. Just as sure as I knew, looking at him, that he'd used that sword when he was a living man to end someone's life, I could tell that he knew that when I came into that room, when I hit a helpless man over and over and over, each blow rocking him back faster than he could possibly recoil...I wasn't trying to knock him out so we could carry him back to base. For a few seconds, before I got control of my anger, I was just lashing out at the person who hurt my friends. For a few seconds--and a few seconds, to me, feels like a few minutes--all I wanted to do was kill someone.

And I could tell that Zombie Samurai understood. He didn't say anything, though. Maybe things like that, you don't have to talk about.

We got him to our transport flyer and made it back to base in record time. (I don't know whether I inherited some sort of intuitive flying skills from the bird DNA, or if the flyers were just designed to be really user-friendly so that henchmen could pilot them, but I was great with those things.) My stomach was clenched up in knots; we didn't know just what to expect when we got there, but we knew it would be bad.

The bad news was, only five of them were upright. The good news was, the rest of them were trussed up and semi-conscious. I have never felt more grateful to see my friends beaten up and bound with electrical cord than at that moment. "What happened while we were gone?" I asked Goth Grrl. "How come you're not like...the rest of them?"

Goth Grrl looked down at me. She looks creepy when she's staring at you; it's the black eyes. Black-on-black-on-black, no pupils or irises. They stand out even more against the ultra-pale skin. "I share my head with a ghost and a primal darkness spirit. It gives you a different perspective on death."

I nodded. "And the others?"

Gunmetal Grey cocked 'his' head. I could hear the servos whirring under the synthetic skin. "It appears I have no analogue for 'death' in my database. The concepts Gaian Champion was talking about did not translate."

John Q. Public had heavy bags under his eyes, like he was wearing the weight of the world on his shoulders, but he gripped his baseball bat tightly. "Just too stubborn to die, I guess. Same as the Fist, over there."

Shu bowed deep and low. "It is a question of being centered within the universe," she said. "The wheel of karma turns, and it will continue to turn after this body is passed on to its next life. I tried to explain it to the others, but..." she shrugged. "It took me my entire life to achieve the humble understanding I now possess."

I looked over at Saavij. She had found a hunk of meat somewhere in the stores and was gnawing on it. "Kra pochitila mar ka sangiri!" she shouted, pulling into a defensive crouch to protect her prize. "Fo-od! Go-od!"

"Right. Got it." We'd been working with Saavij, but she still had a vocabulary of about fifty words of English. Metaphysical concepts probably didn't get through to her. "Okay, let's start waking this guy up and explaining why it's in his best interests to undo his messes." If we can, I added mentally. His head was lolling in a way I didn't like.

It was a few very tense minutes before Mister Meme opened his eyes. In that time, we tried cold water, light slaps to the face, shouting...but it wasn't until John reached over and pinched the guy's earlobe as hard as he could that Meme's eyelids shot open and he yelped loudly. "Wha-huh-wazza?" he mumbled.

I'd never seen anyone but me move as fast as Zombie Samurai drew his sword and darted in to put its edge right at Mister Meme's throat. "I will make this very simple, animal. This is an amazing world that I have been returned to, filled with wonders to stagger the imagination. I have no doubt that if I slit your throat, we will find someone else in this fantastic new universe to restore our teammates. So while I am willing to spare your life if you undo what you have done, do not mistake this for a bargaining chip. Not for a moment."

Meme's eyes narrowed. "What makes you think I can fix it?" he asked.

"Because you are not dead. If the idea kills anyone who understands it, you would not be able to pass it on. There must be a piece of information, something you withhold from your victims that prevents them from seeing the true solution."

Meme grinned again. God, I hated that grin. "You're pretty smart, dude, you know that? A lot smarter than me. Me, I'm dumb, I'm shallow, I'm amoral..."

I couldn't help it. I snarked, "And those are your good qualities?"

He looked over at me. A thin line of red appeared at his throat before Zombie Samurai could pull the sword back. "No...and that's just what I was made to be. I was grown two weeks ago, built out of flesh to become what I am. Obnoxious, stupid, dangerous, the kind of threat that you'd have to bring into your base to deal with...and a large-scale teleporter." His mouth opened, wider than any human mouth possibly could, and light burst forth from it. It flooded across the room in a stream, manifesting into over a dozen human forms. The one in the middle wore a suit of sleek golden armor, with a dark purple cloak draped over his shoulders.

"I am Regent," he said. "I understand that it will take you some time to understand how thoroughly you have been outmaneuvered, but you would be wise to kneel and show fealty now. The alternative is pain."

TO BE CONTINUED...

Breaking Political News!

2011-07-29T19:16:00.000-07:00

Entire Republican Party Dies In Series Of Horrific Automobile Accidents

Deaths Occur Mere Hours After Obama's Traffic Safety Speech

Disassociated Press--A wave of tragedy struck the Republican Party today, as virtually all elected Republicans in Washington D.C. were struck by moving vehicles and died. The tragedy comes mere hours after a speech by President Barack Obama, in which he came out in favor of pedestrian safety. Said one horrified bystander, "It was the most bizarre thing I've ever seen; they were just hurling themselves in front of cars!"

Ironically, just hours before the hundreds of Congressmen perished, Barack Obama delivered an address to the nation in which he came out strongly against just such behavior. "I think that all Americans agree that the worst thing you can possibly do, for your own safety and that of motorists, is to go play in traffic. Flinging yourself in front of a motor vehicle with a carefree 'Wheeeee!' on your lips is dangerous, perhaps even suicidal, and I am strongly against it."

One driver said of the carnage, "I was just driving along, and I saw Eric Cantor, but I never expected him to just fling himself in front of my car! He even shouted 'Wheeeee!' while he did it!" The driver, like those of the other vehicles, will not be charged with vehicular homicide until the unusual occurrence can be fully investigated.

For now, the nation mourns, and prepares to hold special elections to replace the deceased Republicans. It is uncertain who will stand for those elections, however, as President Obama has just come out in favor of the two-party system.

Self-Taught Superheroes, Part Three

2011-07-27T18:14:00.000-07:00

It had been fifteen minutes since we disconnected the IV, and his eyes were just now beginning to open. The police told us they hadn't taken him off the sedatives since we brought him in eight hours ago, since he was classified as "Dangerous - Potential for Non-Physical Threat." The cops are still learning how to handle supervillains, but they're learning fast.

I wasn't in the room with him; I got to stare at him through a two-way mirror, pacing back and forth fast enough to create a heavy breeze in the room. Neither was Josh; he was back at base, making sure that Susan's condition was stable and sending people out to deal with other little crises that popped up. The world doesn't stop just because one of your best friends gets sick. These days, it doesn't feel like it stops for anything.

Finally, the guy sat up and looked around. He tried to get out of bed, but the restraints stopped him cold. They were the kind we designed to handle bad guys with super-strength, since we weren't sure if he had any kind of telekinetic powers, but from the way he reacted, he wasn't any stronger than a normal person. He looked around wildly, saw my new partner, and glared at him.

"You might have some difficulties convincing me to commit suicide," Zombie Samurai said, staring back at him with milk-white eyes. "After all, I am already dead." I am supposed to be a hardened superhero, with almost nine months of experience under my belt, but I gotta tell you, that creeped me the heck out. I can only imagine what it did to the guy in the room with him.

Sure enough, he jerked around wildly in the restraints a little more, like a fox caught in a trap. Finally, he subsided and looked over at Zombie Samurai. "What do you want?" he asked.

"You know already," Zombie Samurai said. (Yeah, he's got a name. Don't care, he's a samurai who's also a zombie. I am calling them like I see them, here!) "You are an animal, with an animal's cunning. I can see it on your face; you intend to bargain your freedom for the life of your victim."

The guy smiled. I really wanted to punch that smile. "Yeah, pretty much," he said. "So are you the one who can make that decision, or do I need to talk to the chickie behind the glass?" He looked over at me. Not just at the mirror, or in my general direction, right at me. "You might as well come on out, little girl. I know you're in there."

I didn't come out. Because I'm not stupid. Instead, I pushed a button to talk to him through the intercom. "I think I'll stay in here," I said. "I'm not dead just yet, and I don't think I'd like it." I pressed the button again. "Um, no offense."

The guy pursed his lips like he'd just eaten a lemon. "I can't get into your head," he said reluctantly. "I can see it, but it's like a tape recorder moving at the wrong speed. Your leader picked the right freaks to talk to me, you and your freak buddy here."

"Then I guess you're out of luck," I responded. I realized I hadn't hit the button yet. "Then I guess you're out of luck," I repeated. "You can't do anything mental, you can't do anything physical, and your buddies are all in jail right with you. You want to make a deal, Mister...?"

"Meme," he said. "Mister Meme." He attempted a sort of vague half-bow, but the restraints kept him from doing too much. I seriously don't know how police deal with people like this every day without smacking them around. "And yes, I do. I want out. Out of the restraints, out of the crappy prison, and maybe a ticket to someplace nice with no extradition treaties. Haven't done my homework on those, though. Does Rio work? I think I'd like Rio."

"Cute." Great. Just what we needed. We were facing off against the Fighting LOLcat, and he was acting smug. "You want to make a deal, we'll bring Susan in and have you fix whatever it was you did to her and then we'll talk to the cops about maybe reducing your sentence for attempted murder."

He laughed. He actually laughed. Zombie Samurai hadn't even moved, just kept staring at him with those freaky dead eyes, but the guy was actually laughing. "You think this is still about 'Susan'?" I mentally winced--I hadn't meant to use her real name. He was a telepath, though; he probably knew already. "You're going to have to let me out soon, chickadee, I guarantee you that. You won't be able to fit them all in here for me to fix."

"What?" I asked. I knew what he meant already, but my mouth hadn't caught up with my mind.

"Memes are ideas that reproduce." He kept staring at me, that ugly little smile still on his face. "Susie girl has an idea in her head, a puzzle with 'Kill Yourself' as the only answer. And just like any good brainteaser, she's going to pass it on. You and your freak buddy are immune, but..." He chuckled. "In fact, now that I think about it? Let's extend that free pass to all my friends. Or otherwise you're going to go back home to a stack of corpses."

Zombie Samurai looked over at me. I was really glad for the two-way mirror, because I didn't have a clue what to do and it was written all over my face.

TO BE CONTINUED...

The Other Problem With "A Good Man Goes To War"

2011-07-24T18:29:00.000-07:00

I watched "A Good Man Goes To War" again last week, and it still didn't sit as well with me as some of the other Moffat Who episodes have in the past. I'm aware that some of it is due to the episode's status as a "mid-season cliffhanger"--after all, it literally has to end with the Doctor at least somewhat outmaneuvered by his enemies, and with the bad guys having gained some form of triumph. I'm also aware that some of it is due to the fact that the conflict with said bad guys has to, by its very nature, see-saw wildly over the course of the episode. They must first be built up as a formidable threat so that we legitimately doubt the Doctor can defeat them; then they must be utterly defeated by the Doctor so that he can "rise higher than ever before"; then they have to pull some form of triumph from the jaws of defeat so that he can fall "so much further". (Neither of which is true, but given that it's River describing events there, I'll excuse her as having a certain degree of understandable bias.)

But what bugged me on rewatching it was River's speech to the Doctor at the end. You know, the one about "All this is to some extent your fault because you're so terrifying to those who would oppose you that they've gone to insane lengths to defeat you." Which is not too dissimilar to Davros' "You claim to be a non-violent explorer who doesn't like weapons, but you do seem to have a habit of getting other people to do your dirty work," but I could at least excuse that one away because it was freaking Davros talking, and Davros is such a vicious and amoral little twerp that hearing him chastise the Doctor's ethics was a little like getting a lecture on veganism from Adolf Hitler.

But River is supposed to be a viewpoint character. She's supposed to know more than the Doctor, for Pete's sake, due to the peculiarities of their temporal relationship to each other, and she's laying the blame for Melody's kidnapping at the Doctor's feet. Why? Because apparently he's become so good at fighting evil that bad guys are getting ruthless and desperate and over-the-top in their efforts to stop him. Because he actually frightens the wicked and the cruel the way they frighten everybody else.

Hey, you know what might be an option for them? NOT BEING SO F***ING EVIL. The Doctor doesn't just swoop down on random people off the street and mess up their lives. He went after these people because they were kidnappers who experimented on children, because they were murderers who mutilated their own troops and turned them into horrific mindless killing machines, because they were allied with a race of yes-I-will-say-it monsters whose goal is to destroy the universe and who actually succeeded once. River says these guys are scared of the Doctor? I wanted the Doctor to respond with, "Not scared enough. Because they haven't stopped."

But instead the Doctor changes the subject to realizing that he actually knows who River is (and he's excited by it, not squicked out, which is another thing wrong about the episode) and we're left with a vague sort of impression that maybe River's right. And she's not. The only people who are afraid of the Doctor are the bad guys. And honestly, if you hear that wheezing, groaning sound and worry that this time, he's come for you...then you must have done something pretty bad. People like that deserve a little fear, if only as punishment for all they inflict.

Self-Taught Superheroes, Part Two

2011-07-21T18:44:00.000-07:00

(Apologies for the delay in posting--I literally didn't realize it was Thursday until I got up today. This week has been rocketing past! This one's also a little shorter than the last one. The last one was actually longer than I intended it to be, this is more in line with the "normal" length. Anyhow, less talk, more superheroes.)

I probably created a pretty major scene when I came into the room. I mean, soaking wet straight through my costume, mask off, little bits of half-digested tranquilizer in my hair...it's no wonder everyone stopped what they were doing and stared at me. "Hummingbird!" Josh cried out as he launched himself out of his chair. His eyes were wide with surprise. (Josh is the only one who calls everyone by their code names, all the time. I'm pretty good about it in public, everyone else is hit or miss. Except Adam, who's miss or miss.)

I waved back in the direction of the dorms. "SusanImeanGaianChampionshe'sinthebathroomshe tookawholebunchofpillsIthinktheguyshewasfightingdidsomethingtoherbrainshepukedmostofthem upallovermebutshe'sstilllookingprettywoozyandshe'stooheavyformetocarryweneedtogetherdown herefastsothatsomeonecangethersomemedicalattention!"

Everyone just kept staring at me for a second or two, until I realized I'd forgotten to talk at a normal speed. "Susan. Upstairs. Sick. Took some pills, lots of pills. I don't think she's dying, but she needs help." I forced each word out at a deliberate pace, putting what felt like an eternity between each word. Even then, I think it probably came out at a machine-gun pace.

But it was slow enough. Josh sprang into flight, cruising through the archway at about fifty miles an hour and already accelerating. (This is why we have no doors at the Academy.) While he was gone, the rest of us made a place for him to set her. Darcshield went to the supply room to get medicine (thankfully one of his four PhDs is in medicine), while I made a mental note that we needed to get our act together and turn some of the space around here into an infirmary. Assuming there wasn't one around here already--that was the problem with appropriating your headquarters from a criminal mastermind instead of building it yourself, nobody knew where the heck anything was.

Josh got back with Susan before Darcshield got back with meds, and he put her down on the floor and did his best to make her comfortable. It was scary seeing her like that--she looked so pale. Normally her skin was a dark green, a kind of a forest green color. But now she was only a shade darker than I was. (Yes, I do have skin the color of mint chocolate chip ice cream. That's just the way the ball bounces when your dad cures your congenital degenerative metabolic condition with an infusion of hummingbird DNA. I guess I'm lucky I didn't grow feathers.) Susan's eyes were open...ish, and she was kind of mumbling, but she was too weak to make any of it out.

It felt like forever before Darcshield got back, and I'm pretty sure that even went for the people who experienced time at normal speed. But he forced some gunk down her throat, and then he sat her up while she puked her guts out again all over the floor (sorry, I'm describing a lot of puking and not much in the way of exciting escapades of superheroism. We do those, too, I promise!) Then he poured some other gunk down her throat that she didn't puke up. "Activated charcoal," he said, in response to people's stares. "It'll bind up the drug, keep anything that's still in her stomach from being absorbed into the bloodstream. There's also a cathartic in there to get her to, um...expel it quicker."

"But when she wakes up," I said. "Will she try again?"

He paused for a long moment. "I don't know," he said at last. "This is physical medicine. We don't have any telepaths on the team, nobody who can tell what he did to her mind. The only person who knows what he did to her, and how to fix it if it needs fixing, is..."

"Him." Josh finished the thought. "The guy who did this to her." He frowned. "Looks like we need to go see a man in a cell."

TO BE CONTINUED...

Utterly Shameless Plug, 2011 Edition

2011-07-15T19:07:00.001-07:00

Naturally, it goes almost without saying that in addition to my general pop-culture savviness, I also happen to be an erudite scholar of the first order. As such, it should surprise virtually nobody that I am featured in an academic publication of the highest order, from the textbook publishers at University of Ottawa Press.

Called "Braaaiiinnnsss! From Academics to Zombies", and edited by Robert Smith? (the mathematician who made a media splash a while back by modeling the spread of a zombie virus mathematically), this textbook features a variety of academic essays on the truest and most vital topic of the age: the zombie apocalypse. Mine is but one of a veritable cornucopia of scholarly discussions on the zombie problem that faces the world today, a humble contribution on the epidemiology of the zombie plague.

The book is available at a variety of outlets, such as:

http://www.press.uottawa.ca/book/braaaiiinnnsss

(or, for those of you who would prefer to read the essays in French, at: http://www.presses.uottawa.ca/livre/braaaiiinnnsss)

and of course, Amazon has it at:

http://www.amazon.com/Braaaiiinnnsss-Academics-Zombies-Robert-Smith/dp/0776607707

So remember, it's three a's, three i's, three n's, and three s's. "Braaaiiinnnsss"! Be very careful about asking for it by name.

Self-Taught Superheroes, Part One

2011-07-07T18:03:00.000-07:00

The shower stall would probably have felt cramped even if I hadn't been sharing it with Susan. With both of us in there, I barely even had room to wriggle.

Okay. I should probably mention that we were both fully clothed. And the water was on. And it was really, really cold. And Susan was only about an eighth of the way awake, and getting less so every minute. Which was, natch, why she was under icy cold water with Yours Truly holding her upright and giving her a good slap every few seconds.

At least, that was the plan. It had a few flaws.

The first flaw was that, as I mentioned, there was not much room. If Susan tipped about six inches one way, she was leaning against the wall. If she tipped six inches the other, she was slumped onto me. That leads me naturally to mentioning the second flaw, which is that she's a good head and a half taller than me. And, um, she's kind of...I'll say "full-bodied", because you might get the wrong idea if I called her "stacked", seeing as how I'm already describing the two of us showering together. Suffice to say that I could barely see the face I was supposedly slapping because there was a massive wall of breast practically smothering me at about mouth level.

You could probably say that this wasn't turning out to be my favorite day ever.

It hadn't started that bad. Word was really starting to get out about the Academy, and we had three new recruits show up that day. I didn't get to see one of them, but Adam did; he said she was calling herself Skreem Queen, and he talked about her like he couldn't think about anything else. But that's Adam. I think he falls in love once a day and twice on Sundays. He'll move on to the next girl soon enough. (Or at least, he'll move on to hitting on the next girl soon enough. Guy's been shot down more often than Snoopy.)

The other one called himself Blue-Collar, and he seemed nice; he was an older guy, maybe in his forties, but he didn't act all overconfident and try to pretend he knew more than everybody just because he was older than most of us. He was polite, listened a lot, and he even told us his real name. There are people who have been here longer than I have that haven't given a real name yet.

The last one kind of...okay, not kind of. There's no real way you can "kind of" creep someone out when you're a walking corpse with a metal plate that covers half your face and a giant freaking katana you carry around with you everywhere. He gave his real name, but everyone started calling him "Zombie Samurai" within about thirty seconds. It's probably going to stick way better than his real name.

But yeah, three new people. Recruits, teammates, roommates, whatever you want to call them. That put us up to twenty-five. I started to feel like maybe we were hitting a critical mass of some sort, like maybe Josh's big plan was starting to work. (He just calls it The Plan. I swear, you can hear the capital letters.)

But then the Destructors hit Los Angeles. The first time we fought them, there was about four of them. This time, there was nine...and we were already split into three teams because the Grand Finale was laying waste to Seattle and we needed about seven people just for him, and the Shadow Confederacy had just broken through into our dimension right on top of the Mall of America. Twenty-five people didn't feel like nearly enough some days.

We did alright, though. A couple of the new Destructors were just wannabes, guys who heard about the "super-villain" craze and thought they could use their training or skills or whatever to hang with the gang and commit mayhem. One of them wasn't even wearing a cup. I have official news for you. When you're fighting someone who can hit you three hundred seventy-two times in the instant that you blink, you definitely want to be wearing a cup.

I thought it went well. Admittedly, I thought that the guy fighting Susan seemed to have a strange attitude and one of those creepy, weird auras that screamed, "I have mental powers!" But I also thought Susan wrapped him up in tangle vines and cut off his oxygen before he could do anything. (One of the weird things about actually having real-life superheroes is that you find out that all the powers that sounded really lame in the comics, like plant control, turn out to be terrifyingly bad-ass. "Weather control"? Nobody ever picked it in my gaming group, but Stormcrow has made grown men piss themselves. And she's younger than I am.)

But when we got back to the dorms, Susan started acting...funny. Just staring off into space, with this sad look on her face. Which wouldn't have seemed out of place on Stormcrow or Goth Grrl, but Susan was always cheerful. I started to worry about her, then. When she went into the bathroom and didn't come back out, I decided to go with my gut. (Rule Number Thirty-Two of the Academy, as contributed by John Q. Public: Always go with your gut.) I kicked open the door and went inside.

I found Susan slumped down on the floor with a bottle of sleeping pills next to her. Most of them were gone. It did not take a nuclear scientist to figure out where they went. (We actually have a nuclear scientist on the team. But I was not about to go ask him right then, obviously.) Whatever that guy was, he must have had some sort of...I dunno, psychic sting or something, some sort of delayed-effect blast that hit her hard and made her suicidal. Which meant that in the long term, we needed to figure out if it would wear off, or at least find someone who could reverse it. In the short term, though, I needed to keep Susan awake and alive.

It wasn't going well. I had managed to manhandle--okay, womanhandle--her under the shower head, and the cold water was going full blast. But I had no idea how to get her to puke up the pills, which was kind of important if she was going to live through this. Everyone else had gone downstairs to talk (Josh says it's a "debriefing". We all just say we're talking about how we can do better. Josh is awesome, but he takes himself a little too seriously sometimes.) The long and short of it was, I was soaked to the skin in icy water, my best friend on the team was barely conscious, and my original plan--shout myself hoarse and pray someone had super-senses they hadn't mentioned yet--was not working.

So I did the only thing I could think of. I punched her in the stomach.

Not hard, or anything. I mean, I'm only sixteen, even if I do hit a little harder than your average sixteen year old girl. When it comes to brutality, I'm a "quantity over quality" kind of kid. But it turned out that with a belly full of pills that Susan's body was already trying to get rid of, that was enough. She let fly with a big mouthful of ick, all over the top of my head.

It added a lot of extra suck to an already sucky day. But at least I was already in the shower.

TO BE CONTINUED...

What the Hey

2011-07-07T17:49:00.000-07:00

I've been reading 'Chicks Dig Time Lords' and 'Whedonistas' lately, both from Mad Norwegian Press (what can I say, Mad Norwegian had an excellent presence at CONvergence last week)...and one of the things that it reminded me of is just how much fun it was to write fan-fiction. That sense of writing on the fly, with no grand plan, purely to see if people liked what you wrote...I realize I kind of missed that.

There's just one problem. I don't want to write other people's characters.

So starting on Monday, until I get sick of it or people beg me to stop, I'm going to try writing a fanfiction that doesn't use any established characters, set in my own universe. (Yes, I'm aware that this would just be "writing fiction". Hush. My brain seems to think there's a distinction, and if I can fool it into writing more, I'm going with it.) I'll write, and see what comes out. I know where I'm starting, at least...and you'll find out on Monday.

Review: My Sucky Teen Romance

2011-07-04T17:55:00.001-07:00

Hey, everybody! I just got back from CONvergence, a local sci-fi con that we've made it a habit of going to the last few years. It was a nice experience--among other things, I bumped into an old friend I haven't seen for over a decade--and one of the coolest things was getting a chance to see Emily Hagins' new film, 'My Sucky Teen Romance'.

You might not have heard of Emily Hagins--I hadn't--but she's a film-maker from Austin, Texas who has made a couple of feature films prior to MSTR, 'Pathogen' and 'The Retelling'. This film, her third, focuses on a group of teens going to a local sci-fi con (clearly inspired by and shot at CONvergence) who run afoul of a vampire...one who's exploiting his resemblance to Robert Pattinson and the current 'Twilight' craze to get his fill of teenage blood. It's got quite a few sharp, clever lines, makes use of the con setting well to make it look like they spent a lot more money on it than they did, and is generally fun and witty.

Oh, and by the way, Emily Hagins is just now turning eighteen. Just in case you weren't impressed yet.

All eighteenage aside, this is a very good film. It's low-budget and that does sometimes show (but not as often as you might think), and the use of authentic teenagers as actors means there's some stiffness now and again (but in a film that's very much about teen awkwardness and romance between shy and introverted people, that's not always a drawback) and it does briefly get a little talky towards the end of the second act...but frankly, this is not a film you need to grade on a curve to say nice things about. There are a lot of people who are making movies on much bigger budgets with much more polished actors who have turned out a much less watchable product than 'My Sucky Teen Romance'. Put this in a room with 'Transformers: Dark of the Moon', and you'd be muting Optimus Prime after about five minutes.

I don't know where this film will go from here, theatrically or on DVD, but I'm definitely going to find out. There are a few fourteen year olds I know who would love to see it.

Vader: Master Of Espionage

2011-06-30T19:32:00.000-07:00

I was thinking last night about 'Star Wars' (an always popular topic in my brain) when something interesting clicked in my brain about the movie. We're told, of course, that Vader in the original film was nothing more than a jumped-up thug, a blunt instrument with Tarkin "holding his leash". But what if the opposite was true? What if it was not Tarkin commanding Vader, but Vader playing a deadly and subtle game that involved letting Tarkin think he was in command?

Think about it. The Emperor is planning to dissolve the Imperial Senate and rule directly through his planetary governors. In order to keep the planetary governors from breaking away and forming their own hegemonies, he has the Death Star present as a weapon of last resort. No planetary governor is going to risk retribution on that scale. But then, logically, I asked myself, what's to stop Tarkin from deciding he's just going to cruise this puppy on down to Coruscant and turn the Imperial throneworld into bacon bits? The Emperor might have Force powers, but I don't think they make lightsabers big enough to deflect that laser. No, the Emperor would have to live in constant worry that Tarkin would betray him, unless he had someone on the station keeping him in line...

And that's when it hit me. Vader. He might be doing Tarkin's bidding--in fact, he probably wants to appear as nothing more than Tarkin's obedient dog, to lull any suspicions Tarkin might have--but deep down, he's a Sith apprentice. I'd be willing to bet that if Tarkin did try to foment mutiny and usurp the throne, he would have gotten a cauterized wound through his heart faster than you can say, "I think you underestimate their chances."

And then, of course, at the end of the film, the Emperor's ultimate terror weapon that he plans to use to keep his generals in line...blows up. Very publicly blows up. Perhaps that's why we see Vader, in the next movie, tooling around the galaxy in a Super Star Destroyer throwing his weight around among all the Admirals. He's not just crushing the Rebellion, he's making a statement to anyone who might be thinking about taking advantage of the Empire's weakness.

R I P Gene Colan

2011-06-24T21:48:00.001-07:00

I'm glad that I took the time to send him fanmail while it still had the chance of meaning something to him; Gene Colan was one of the legends of Marvel comics, a genuine artist with a distinctive and dreamlike style unlike anyone else in the field, then or now. His art on Doctor Strange and Daredevil was iconic, and his work on Tomb of Dracula remains an unsurpassed milestone of moody horror. He was gracious and generous, and his response to my fanmail was just one of many examples of that.

"Gentleman" Gene Colan, one of the great ones. Rest in peace.

Review: Bloodstone, by Nate Kenyon

2011-06-23T07:06:00.001-07:00

I found this book on my bookshelf one day a while back. It was in with the unread books (I sort books into two groups, read and unread) but I couldn't remember when I bought it. In fact, not only could I not remember when I bought it, I also couldn't remember where or why. I don't think I bought it based on the back cover blurb; I suspect that I must have read a slightly more detailed synopsis, saw the word "zombies", and decided to pick it up and only just now got back to it.

Having finished it, I don't feel too bad about not getting to it right away. It's not a bad book by any stretch; I've read far worse novels by far more experienced authors. (This is Nate Kenyon's first book.) But it is what it is, a first novel by someone who hasn't yet stepped out of the shadow of his idols Stephen King and Peter Straub to find his own voice as a writer. While I suspect that Kenyon might have some good books ahead of him, maybe even some genuinely great ones, this is the work of a fledgling writer who's still sorting things out.

One of the big things that he needs to sort out is who he is. Right now, this feels like a painter trying to forge the work of an Old Master; the touches are all King, but the inspiration that guides the work is clearly that of someone of lesser skill. A clarifying disclaimer: I'm obviously not saying that Kenyon is plagarizing King, merely that he uses many of King's stylistic touches. There's a Christine-like social outcast who falls under the domineering influence of a possessing ghost, a Shining-esque sequence where a character is tempted to drink by ghosts in a bar that inexplicably appears the way it did where it was new, and one of the death scenes of a minor character feels like it fell out of Salem's Lot and the vampires turned to zombies when it hit the ground. Even the opening sequence, which is attention-grabbing and clever, has more than a little similarity to the opening of Peter Straub's Ghost Story.

And the similarities make the weaknesses of the story compared to King or Straub's work that much more apparent. It's an "ancient evil comes back to haunt small town in Maine" tale (it's not Kenyon's fault that he lives in the same part of the country as King, but it is unfortunate...) But Kenyon hasn't yet learned how to write on the kind of grand tapestry this sort of story requires, where the small New England town becomes a world in microcosm and the intensity builds as the novel moves towards a climax. There's plenty of atmosphere, but nothing actually happens until about page 280 of a 33o-page novel. It's as if Stephen King had to cut IT down to fit the publisher's requirements, and so he took out all the monster attacks and all of the town history sequences.

Despite all this, as I say, the novel is not without promise. The prose flows well, and is not marred by any of the clumsy cliches that plague the horror genre. The zombies and supernatural elements, while underused, aren't bad (although again, too reminiscent of King.) The characters are sympathetic and well-drawn, and there are some interesting choices in their backstory and the dynamic between them. This is a novel that you could maybe look back on and see the potential in...but I don't know if it's worth reading for its own sake.

Half-Hearted Perfunctory DC Complaint

2011-06-21T17:31:00.000-07:00

So let's get this straight. DC is making a fresh, young, accessible DC Universe...where Batman has already gone through four Robins, Superboy has already been cloned from Superman, and the entire War of Light has already happened because God forbid Geoff Johns has to erase even a single one of his stories from continuity. Oh, and Hal, Guy, John and Kyle are all Green Lanterns already in this new, more accessible DC. And "The Killing Joke" is in continuity, but Batgirl isn't Oracle.

This isn't even worth making fun of...except for the blurb for Justice League Dark, which is the perfect parody of a crazed talentless manchild fanboy's idea of what the Justice League "should be like" that somehow got made into an actual comic. This isn't like "Crisis on Infinite Earths", where they genuinely tried to start the DC universe over as a single coherent construct and got hamstrung by some lingering pre-reboot continuity. This isn't even like "Infinite Crisis", where they tried to undo "Crisis on Infinite Earths" and go back to the convoluted continuity because they liked it better. This is just plain inept. Seriously, all the analogies I can think of for this reboot, I can't say, because I think that jokes about the mentally challenged are mean-spirited and tasteless.

The only good thing I can say is coming out of this is that they're finally folding the Wildstorm universe into the DC Universe the way they should have six years ago. (And I haven't heard anything about the Authority, which is also good. The Authority are a good stand-alone team, but they've always fit awkwardly at best into a shared fictional universe, and that would only get worse if they had to rub shoulders with Superman and Batman.) But really, once you've decided to bring back Batman, Inc. in a year rather than piss off Grant Morrison, why even bother calling it a reboot? Why not just say, "Fuck continuity, we're changing the backstory whenever we feel like it and you can just fucking cope!"

Oh, right. Because the only reason fans stick around for the bad stories is to find out what effect they'll have on the vast, overcomplicated metastory. My bad.

Body Fascism Is Deeply Disturbing

2011-06-16T20:01:00.000-07:00

Last night my wife, who is a frequent and unrepentant knitter, decided to test a theory she had heard about unisex hat patterns. Supposedly, unisex hats are all really made for women and called unisex, and guys just wind up needing to buy a larger size to accommodate their heads. (No, this is not the body fascism of the title. Making men feel as though they have grotesque melon-y heads is not actually body fascism.)

My head came out to be 24 inches in circumference. And I was like "Oh, hey, that's interesting," until someone made a joke about how we just needed to find two people with heads 36 inches around. And then I thought about it. Seriously? That's what's supposed to be attractive in a woman? Having a waist that is literally about the size of my head? That doesn't seem sexy, that seems freakish and disturbing. And oh yeah, deeply deeply unhealthy. I can't imagine what it would take to make your waist that thin (actually, having read some stuff about Vampira, yes I can and oh that poor woman...) But honestly, I can't say I'd even find it attractive.

Please, women of the world. On behalf of my gender, I say...we're really not worth it. Go ahead and have dessert with that.

How 'The Lion King' Should Have Gone

2011-06-14T18:38:00.000-07:00

Scar: The future is littered with prizes
And though I'm the main addressee
The point that I must emphasize is
You won't get a sniff without--holy crap, is that lava? Oh my god, this whole place is going up! Run! Run, my hyena minions! Oh, God, no! Sweet merciful mother Earth, we're all going to dieeeeEEEEEEAAAGGHHH!!! (screams drowned out in an unholy explosion of superheated sulfuric gases, pyroclastic ash, and molten rock)

Then the rest would have just been Rafiki hitting people.

Things I Just Got Around To Reading: Burning Chrome

2011-06-11T16:54:00.000-07:00

Not just 'Burning Chrome', actually, but William Gibson in general. Not just William Gibson in general, actually, but pretty much cyberpunk as a genre; aside from 'Headcrash' and the stellar cyberpunk pastiche Doctor Who novel 'Transit', I've just missed the genre completely. I was born just a little too young to hit it square on as it happened, and since I knew it would be there whenever I got around to it, I never felt any great hurry to get back to it. But then a very close friend was encouraging me to read it, and I popped it in my luggage for a trip, and then when I got back from the trip after reading "Johnny Mnemonic" I popped it in my book bag to take to work, and now I've finally read it. And what do I think?

Well, there's a lot to admire. Gibson is an unquestionably talented writer; his short stories have amazing prose that is almost like Beat poetry (this is not, of course, a coincidence) and he's a master of storytelling economy. He manages to fill in entire worlds in the gaps between sentences, where lesser writers might have had to insert monologues to explain them. (Actually, in general short stories are a far more challenging art than novels; Stephen King, for example, is a good novelist but a masterful short story writer. It is much harder to say something well in 8,000 words than it is to say it in 800 pages.)

But I will admit that I admired Gibson's stories more than enjoyed them. There was a sense of coldness to them, as though they were saying to me, "Look but don't touch." I spent a lot of the collection trying to figure out where that sensation came from, and I finally came to the conclusion that a lot of it came from his treatment of women.

I'm not going to say that William Gibson is a misogynist. I think that's a very strong word that gets thrown around a lot and tends to shut down discussion a lot more than it starts it. But I do feel like it seemed like Gibson was having some issues with women that came out in his work of the period. Virtually all of his female characters in the collection are manipulative, loveless, ambitious and duplicitous. I realize that some of this came out of the deliberate attempt to pastiche the film noir genre in a different medium and setting, which in turn replicated those writers' very real misogyny (anyone who wants to try to argue that Mickey Spillane wasn't misogynist, good luck to ya...) But when it's a repeated theme, that the lead characters are betrayed by the women in their lives (or in the case of "Dogfight", betray them in a sequence that's uncomfortably close to rape...) it's hard to feel good about what you're reading. It's hard to enjoy it. So I admire but don't enjoy.

But I do admire a whole lot.

River Song: A Confession

2011-06-08T16:32:00.000-07:00

I know this is going to be a bit of a shocker, particularly to fellow Doctor Who fans, but...to me, River Song gets less interesting every time she shows up in the series.

I obviously don't want to give anything away for "A Good Man Goes To War", which hasn't officially aired in North America, but suffice to say that Big Revelations about River are in the offing. And like all the other Big Revelations about River Song, it seems to me to diminish her in my imagination just a little bit more. When we first saw River Song, she was a larger-than-life human able to hang with the Doctor on his own level, a woman who may or may not have been his lover (or even his wife) who has her own tremendous, exciting adventures that only occasionally intersect with those of the Doctor...and those not necessarily in consecutive order at that.

Now? She's that woman who lives in Stormgate Prison and breaks out every once in a while when the Doctor needs her. She's someone who lives life backwards to the Doctor, not sideways and upside-down and at crazy non-Euclidean angles. She's someone who, not to spoil "A Good Man Goes To War", has a specific and finite character arc that we have already seen, in a sense, the beginning and end of. It's hard to see her as an equal to the Doctor in that light. After all, he's a man with an unlimited past and a wide-open future. River is anything but.

I miss the River who wasn't anything but. I miss the River whose story couldn't be told on television because you can't hire an actress to time travel fifteen years into the future to pretend to be her own younger self. I miss the River who might only have lived into her forties (assuming she wasn't from an era where someone could live to be two hundred and still look like they were in their forties...) yet spent those years full of life and adventure, crossing paths with twenty-seven incarnations of the Doctor in her career as archaeologist, smuggler, burglar, professional jailbird, and dozens of other professions in a rich life filled with incident. Like the Star Wars prequels, River fails for me not because of any failings of Steven Moffat, but because the River Song in my head was mine and nobody else's is ever going to be as good.

I know that a lot of people aren't going to agree with this. They like Moffat's River Song, and I don't blame them. But I think if you could meet mine, you'd like her better too.

Hulk Relates the Classics: His Girl Friday

2011-06-04T12:58:00.000-07:00

"Hello. Today Hulk tell you about classic screwball comded...commud...funny movie by Howard Hawks, called His Girl Friday. Hulk think Howard Hawks is Bird-Nose, Hulk's old friend, but Hulk not sure. Hulk will ask Bird-Nose next time he sees him what it like in Tinseltown.

"His Girl Friday starts with pretty girl and boring puny man going to say hello to shouty man. Boring puny man thinks shouty man is scary, but shouty man not scary. Hulk could crush shouty man! Shouty man never win Oscar anyway, except for honorary award in 1970! Honorary award sop to actor more famous than good! Hulk hate puny character actors! RRRRRAAAAARGH!

"Where was Hulk? Oh. Right. Shouty man and pretty girl talk too fast about stupid things. Shouty man says he loves pretty girl, but pretty girl is bored with him talking too fast and wants him to go away forever. Shouty man says he will do it if pretty girl goes to talk to puny puny man in jail, but he is lying! Hulk hate lying shouty man! Hulk think 'Arsenic and Old Lace' overrated translation of stage play anyway! Hulk prefer 'High Society' better than 'Philadelphia Story'! GRRRRRRRR!

"Hulk sorry. Hulk better now. So then pretty girl goes to jail to talk to puny puny man, and...puny puny man remind Hulk of Banner! Hulk hate Banner! Hulk hate puny puny man! But Hulk nonetheless finds moral ambiguity of situation fascinating. Puny puny man's insanity defense not genuinely warranted, but pretty girl support it anyway because stupid Mayor want puny puny man put to death. Stupid Mayor deserve to resign in disgrace, but puny puny man merely pawn in vaster game of politics. Hulk love flawed heroes!

"Then puny puny man escapes. Shouty man and pretty girl help him. Boring man not seen for most of movie. This not fair to boring man! Boring man not bad, just boring, and pretty girl dump him for shouty man just because shouty man has big chin! Hulk hate movie where romance presented as superior to long-term stability and emotional compatibility! Hulk hate unrealistic expectations placed on couples based on Hollywood "fiery romances"! Romance easier when couple only stays together until end credits! REARRRRRRGH!

"But before contrived and unrealistic romance plays out, stupid Mayor and stupid policeman try to arrest pretty girl and shouty man and puny puny man. But governor commutes sentence. Stupid Mayor looks stupid in front of everybody! Stupid policeman looks stupid in front of everybody! Contrived and unrealistic romance seems natural because actors have good chemistry. Everyone talks very very fast and boring man goes away. THE END."

There Is No Hyperbole Great Enough

2011-05-31T18:14:00.000-07:00

DC Comics made an announcement today that should absolutely, positively, unequivocally stun everyone in the entire comics-reading world today. Seriously. There has never been news this big in my entire lifetime in the industry, not ever.

No, not the "We're relaunching everything at #1!" crap. That'll be retconned away within five years, max. (Geoff Johns and Grant Morrison have a collective Silver Age crush that makes Mark Waid look like Alan Moore. Their "reboots" are never going to last, because they're coming from the guys who undid 'Crisis' and invented a whole cosmology-shattering mini-series so that they could bring back the 70s Legion. Geoff Johns is psychologically incapable of true innovation.) No, I'm talking about the news of same-day digital distribution.

Or, as I call it, "Hey, comic book stores! F*** you sideways!"

Sure, DC is trying to downplay this. They're trying to say that they will have special incentives designed to get people into stores. (This is roughly akin to stabbing someone with a broadsword, hooking the open wound up to a turbine-powered exsanguinating vacuum pump, and then announcing that you plan to put some band-aids on the counter.) They're no doubt going to say that collectors will always want the print edition. (But in the kinds of numbers that can support an independent retailer?) They will no doubt point to their back-catalog of trade paperbacks. But honestly, that's all like spritzing the Hindenburg with one of those little plant misters.

Because this...this is in all likelihood the beginning of the end for print comics. Same-day digital means that anyone who wants to can go download their comics directly. No trips to the comics store, no waiting, your very own copy of a comic right there on the hard drive. And let's face it, the iPad has been regarded from the beginning as a perfect platform for digital comics. This is going to drain away a big chunk of the market from print.

And the profit margins for comics stores aren't great. Losing a big chunk of your DC sales is probably going to result in some retailers going out of business, especially for those stores that are going to have to try to guess how much their demand is going to drop and will be stuck with unsold copies if they over-order. (Personally, if I was a comic book store owner? Tomorrow, I'd have a sign outside saying, "DC Comics will only be available at this retail outlet if you pre-order them.")

And if stores start going out of business, Marvel is going to have to either jump on the digital bandwagon or lose money as they lose outlets for their product. And if Marvel goes digital, the death spiral continues...there's not a retailer running that can survive on solely its indie books. They need Marvel and DC to pay the bills, and they might not be there much longer.

Some might suggest that this is hyperbole. They might say that comics is such a tradition-oriented industry that this initiative will fail and leave comics back where it started, a niche market catering to nostalgia. (It's certainly the argument that I'm using regarding the "Every issue is a new #1!" BS.) Time will tell if I'm right or wrong.

But on the other hand...if MGM announced that it was making a new James Bond movie, and also announced that all their movies would be available on Netflix the same day as they came out in theaters...wouldn't you be talking less about who Bond is going to be and more about how hard this is going to make life for movie theater owners?

Line Item: Hired Goons

2011-05-29T07:55:00.000-07:00

Sorry about the slight delay in posting; I started a new job last week (yay!) and they've thrown me right in at the deep end on a big project, which necessitated lots of overtime this week. (I'm being slightly vague about the details because if there's one thing I've learned from being on the Internet, it's that no matter how innocuous your blog posts about your job are, you still don't want any identifying details about the job.) The big project involves collecting some information from all of our outside contractors in order to update the database.

Anyhow, I got corrected (I'm still a little too new to actually "get in trouble") because, when one of the contractors refused to provide the information, I passed word of that refusal along to the regional manager for that area. I did so mainly because the refusal sounded like it was "with prejudice", as it were, and I wanted them to know that they might have some angry contractors to soothe. As it turned out, though, people like me don't talk directly to people like him. There are channels to go through for that.

I apologized, like you do, and explained that I went directly to the regional manager because I'd been told in the email that "it is your responsibility to make sure the information is collected for every name on this list." As far as I was concerned, that meant I should do whatever I had to in order to get that update done.

I didn't say so at the time, but I did picture using comic hyperbole to make my point. "If I have to email the regional manager, I will. If I have to call the CEO and ask him to make a personal visit, I will. If I have to hire some goons to go out and rough these people up until they update their profile in our system, well, then, that's what I have to do." Pause. "Of course, I'd expect to be reimbursed for that. Do I have to submit an invoice, or...?"

Of course, I'd have to note it in the "Comments" section of their profile. "Goons hired, will contact when vendor roughed up sufficiently."

The Paul Ryan Medicare Plan In a Nutshell

2011-05-24T19:19:00.000-07:00

"Now, I think we're all aware that we have a serious spending problem in this household. I make ten thousand dollars a month, but with the three thousand dollars a month that we pay for Grandma's heart medication and the three thousand dollars a month I spend on sweet, delicious candy, that barely leaves enough to make ends meet. Therefore, I propose that we cut down to spending only one thousand dollars a month on Grandma's heart medication--and because I'm fiscally responsible and willing to make hard choices, I'll only use half of the two thousand dollars we're saving to buy more candy. That's right--I'm such a serious, responsible person that I'm willing to take a full thousand dollars a month that could be used to buy chewy, chocolatey goodness and put it towards saving for our future.

"It's a tough decision, but that's just the kind of guy I am."

Exciting Pixar News!

2011-05-21T13:51:00.000-07:00

Of course, we've all heard the announcement of Monsters University, the next movie after Cars 2 and Brave and the first Pixar prequel. But what you may not have heard is that this is just the first of an entire new slate of films exploring the beginnings of Pixar's beloved characters! Brad Bird and John Lasseter are already thrilled about the idea of getting at the roots of what made Pixar's protagonists tick. Some of the slated films include:

Losing Coral: A shocking and gruesome tale of terror and revenge, Losing Coral focuses on the night when clownfish Coral runs afoul of a brutal, sadistic barracuda named "Heartless" (voiced by Christopher Walken.) The taut, suspenseful thriller follows the deadly game of cat-and-mouse Heartless plays with Coral, a game that ends in tragedy when Heartless murders her and devours her eggs. The film then follows Marlin as, pushed over the edge by the death of his mate, he hunts down and kills Heartless by luring him into a nematocyst. About to commit suicide, Marlin discovers that one egg has survived...an egg he decides to call Nemo.

Cars 0: Carmageddon: When the first machines develop sentience, humanity is initially thrilled by the development of a machine culture. After all, we built them--surely they'll be grateful to their creators? But instead, the human race finds itself locked in a deadly battle with the vehicles they designed, and only one race can survive. In the end, the machines exterminate the people, leaving nothing but the trace remnants of our culture to survive in the entertainments the new mechanical race devises for itself.

The All-Too Credibles: Thrill as Bob puts on a few extra pounds and loses job after job! Gasp as Helen slowly gives up on her own ambitions to become a stay-at-home mom! And be astounded by Violet's unhappy school years as she slowly learns to keep her head down and not make waves because girls don't get called on anyway! It's an exciting descent into vague dissatisfaction for the whole family!

WALL-Lander: As it becomes apparent that humanity will not return, and the trash removal robots slowly begin to break down, each one realizes that the only path to survival is to cannibalize its brethren for parts. A vicious war begins, as each robot seeks to disable its fellows so that it can keep itself alive that much longer. In the end, there can be only one...

...this isn't doing anything to disprove my belief that I'm never going to be working for Pixar, is it?

Why They Will Never Let Me Work At Pixar

2011-05-17T09:12:00.001-07:00

2025: Overpopulation and pollution conspire to breed a new "super-virus", created by chemical-induced mutation of an existing bug and incubated in the vast shantytowns of the underclass. The virus causes vast mutations to the human brain, turning key sections to become anaerobic tissue and allowing other sections to die off. This creates mindless, vicious assailants that continue to attack long after their circulatory and renal systems have shut down. These infected, quickly nicknamed "zombies" due to their difficulty to kill and hunger for living human flesh, spread like wildfire through the overcrowded Earth.

2030: Overpopulation is now the least of humanity's problems, as the zombie plague has now covered 95% of the areas inhabited by humankind. With the last few strongholds of humanity about to fall, the decision is made to evacuate Earth completely. The resources of the remaining population are devoted to creating ships that can hold the survivors for as long as it takes for the zombies to die off. Robotic killing machines are sent out into the wastelands to humanely exterminate the infected, as humanity leaves the world of its birth forever.

2546: A robotic probe is sent back to Earth to determine whether the planet is fit for humanity once more. What it discovers is a terrifying dystopia where the zombie virus has mutated yet again; the zombie survivors have retained their intelligence, and now rule the Earth. Humanity is kept in "breeding pits", enslaved for life and used either for food, or transformed into consumers of human flesh. The robots have all been overwhelmed, save for one. One last hope for the enslaved and exiled humanity, one last hero for the human race...

WALL-E, Zombie Hunter.

...oh, come on. You'd pay to see it.

Why Smallville Is Not Doctor Who

2011-05-15T14:20:00.001-07:00

It's been a while since I've watched an episode of Smallville; I haven't actually checked, because I don't care that much about the show, but I think the last episode I watched in its entirety was the third or fourth episode of Season One. But when I heard that the last episode would be airing on Friday night, I felt that there'd be a certain poetic symmetry in watching only the first(-ish) and the last episodes. Plus, given the reputation that the series has gotten over the last ten years, I figured that I'd be onto something good by skipping the ten seasons of hinting, teasing and stalling and getting straight to his transformation into Superman.

You may now laugh.

As it turned out, even the grand, huge, epic "finale" to Smallville was an exercise in drawing out the thin gruel of a story it had been subsisting on for the last decade. Everything was about not changing, about not surprising, about giving its viewers as close to the same experience as they could get without violating the show's mandate of demonstrating how Clark Kent became Superman. There were reset buttons a-plenty, retcons and reappearances, and massive dodges (I someday want to explain to television writers that legally, you're married when you sign the marriage certificate. Failure to say, "I do" means diddly-squat in the eyes of the law.) And in the end, we never really even got to see Superman; there were a few CGI sequences with the character shown from a distance, but in the end, they were driven by the need to keep things the way they'd always been. "No tights, no flights," the unbreakable rule of the series.

And then, the next night, I watched "The Doctor's Wife". And while I won't spoil anything, because the episode is very wonderful, very surprising, and many people probably haven't seen it yet, I will say that it is the epitome of everything that Doctor Who is and everything that Smallville isn't. Instead of being an "epic game-changer" that really doesn't change anything, not even really the things it's obligated to change...this was a normal, everyday, stand-alone non-arc episode that just happened to transform everything you thought you knew about forty-eight years of the series. And it did it almost casually.

Doctor Who is, and always has been like that. It's never been afraid to reinvent itself, not even after forty-eight years. It's a bold, inventive show that has no boundaries, no self-imposed rules, and no orthodoxies to uphold. That's why it attracted a writer of the caliber of Neil Gaiman, whereas Smallville has had to content itself with Geoff Johns and Jeph Loeb. That's why it's still going and why I don't think it'll ever stop. Because it's a show that can do anything...and one that will do anything.

Amazing Race Round-Up, Finale

2011-05-09T13:38:00.000-07:00

Technically, it's the last two episodes crammed together in a not-at-all-blatantly obvious fashion, no siree! Much like Riding With Death and the Master Ninja series, CBS has seamlessly blended these two episodes into a two-hour extravaganza so brilliantly that you can't even see the join! (I suspect it was somewhere around the Pit Stop at the halfway point, but that could just be crazy talk.)

In any event, at the start of the first epis...er, first half of the episode, the four remaining teams (Flight Time/Big Easy, Zev/Justin, Gary/Mallory, Jen/Kisha) are still in Switzerland. They all head to the airport to get their flights to Rio de Janeiro, and the Globetrotters luck into a flight that seems like it will give them (and Zev/Justin, who were tagging along with them) a seven hour head start over the other two teams. This good fortune lasts until Mallory asks Flight Time, "Did you find anything better?", at which point his eyes widen like he's just seen an oncoming train, his mouth hangs open for a long moment, and he finally says, "Um, no! We were looking to see what y'all got!" Unsurprisingly, his devastating poker face fails to fool Mallory's razor-keen intellect, and soon all four teams are booked on the same flight.

Once they get to Rio, a little taxi roulette and a trolley schedule give the other three teams a half-hour lead over the Globetrotters, which is pretty much entirely eaten up for Zev and Justin when they choose Zev to do a dancing challenge. I'm not going to say he has the worst rhythm of anyone ever on the Race, because I know better, but his lack of dancing skills combined with his social disorder lead him to a) get through the challenge very slowly, and b) slap one of his instructors on the ass, which made me wish she'd have returned the favor on the back of his head. Mallory and Jen cruise through the challenge looking like they had a lot of fun, though.

Then everyone gets fifteen minutes of body waxing. For some, this meant they came out perfectly smooth. For Zev and Justin, it just meant that the waxers managed to get the first couple of layers of fur off. (The timer elapsed before they could get the machetes and flamethrowers to really slash and burn.) After that, three of the teams did the drink-mixing half of the Detour, while Zev and Justin basically said, "Nah, we don't want to be in the Final Three anyway!" and went to go sell bikinis on a beach. Because nothing works like having two white guys, one of whom has a social disorder, wander up and say to random bikini-wearing women, "Hi! Take that off and pay us money to model one of ours!" Needless to say, the first half ends with Zev and Justin getting eliminated. Honestly, they only had one or two genuinely bad legs this time around, but when they were the 10th and 11th, that was all that mattered.

The second epis...er, half...begins with the teams heading back to Miami for the final leg of the Race. There's a lot of chatting, recapping (pffh...recapping...like anyone could make that interesting...) and general catching-up to get people excited for the final trek to the Finish Line...and then Gary and Mallory get a genuinely incompetent taxi driver and don't even see another racer until the last challenge. So this is pretty much a two-team race, here. (For the record, I agree with everybody else who said, "Gary and Mallory should have realized how bad their driver was very early on and ditched him for another instead of sticking with him until it was too late to make up the time." But hindsight is 20/20.)

The other two teams face two Road Blocks in a row (one of those little "gotchas" I appreciate, because it means that teams who strategize all the way through the Race to make sure that their strongest Racer gets the last Road Block wind up having to put their weaker half in for the very last one) and a challenge that was annoying due to wind and weather and the need to be super-attentive to detail. No Detour, though. Come to think of it, there wasn't one last season, either. Maybe they just want to make sure everyone has to do the exact same challenges for the final leg. (That also seems to be the motivation for the obvious bunching for the final leg.)

Then finally, in one of the nastiest final tasks I can remember, they have a seven-mile bike ride to the Finish Line. It's close--the Globetrotters actually have Jen and Kisha in sight as they trek across Seven-Mile Bridge--but in the end, Jen and Kisha become the second all-female team to win the Amazing Race. (Which should, by the way, shut everyone up who claimed that Nat and Kat won by beating a "weak field of Racers"; Jen and Kisha beat several teams that finished in the Final Three on previous Races, and were one of only two all-female teams this time out. And frankly, I think if this Final Three had been put on Nat and Kat's race along with them, they would still have beaten out all five of the other teams. But that's unprovable.)

And that's it for another season of the Amazing Race! As always, I'm looking forward to the next one.

Why Syndrome Makes the Perfect Nemesis

2011-05-05T09:25:00.000-07:00

I've been watching The Incredibles a lot lately; this has something to do with the fact that my daughter comes home from preschool with the words, "Can I watch The Incredibles?" practically bursting from her lips. It's actually displaced Toy Story 2 from the top of her "never sick of watching" list, which I didn't think was ever going to happen. So I've seen it on a near-daily basis, something that's afforded me a few opportunities to think about what Brad Bird was saying with the movie.

One of the things that's interested me is the way that Syndrome, Mr. Incredible, and Dash all seem to have different surface motivations, but the same basic underlying drive. Mr. Incredible, of course, insists that he's being genuinely altruistic; he feels bitter about the public reaction to superheroes (which is actually a matter for another post, because the idea of "superheroes getting sued into retirement" is kind of a handwave, to be honest, but I'm digressing here) and wants nothing more than to go back to the way things were.

Syndrome, on the other hand, is bitter and resentful about the lack of emotional support from Mr. Incredible when he was younger. He wants to show Mr. Incredible that he's a better hero, and that if he'd been allowed to be Incrediboy, he would have been a huge asset to the cause of good--to prove that Mr. Incredible was wrong to dismiss his gifts.

And Dash? He just wants to show off. He wants the world to acknowledge his specialness, and to receive the adulation he feels he deserves for his amazing abilities. Which is a little childish, but then again, he's ten. When he grows up...

...he'll wind up either like Mr. Incredible or Syndrome. Because underneath their surface motivations, that's exactly what they want too. Bob Parr doesn't want to save people anonymously, just because they need saving; he does do that over the course of the movie, but only because he can't go out as Mr. Incredible anymore. He only really comes to life when he's wearing his super-suit, performing amazing feats for an admiring audience (even if that audience is just Mirage and her mysterious benefactor.) Deep down, he really wants things to be the way they were when the world looked upon him with quiet awe and adulation.

Syndrome, of course, makes a second career out of self-justification in the movie. Looking at his actions, he's a pathetic, needy child who needs everyone to praise him for his gifts. As Mr. Incredible points out, he's killing real heroes in order to create a fake villain that people will praise him for stopping. While he claims that he's doing it all for Mr. Incredible, there's never been anything to stop him from using or selling his inventions to make the world a better place; it's just that doing so won't give him the emotional rush that comes from crowds cheering his name. Deep down, he and Mr. Incredible are two sides of the same coin, which is why he makes such a perfect nemesis. (And thus I make good on the implicit promise in the title...)

The real hero of the film, of course, is Elastigirl. She's the only one who can put aside her costume easily, because she wasn't ever in it for the glory; she was a superhero when the world needed one, and only when the world needed one. She's tried to pass along to her kids the belief that it's what the world wants ("the world wants us to fit in") and not selfish personal needs that are important; nonetheless, when her family needs Elastigirl, she proves to be easily the most competent of all of them.

Amazing Race Round-Up, 18-10

2011-05-03T17:12:00.000-07:00

Famous director Akira Kurosawa once directed a film called "Rashomon", based on a short story by Ryunosuke Akutagawa about the death of a samurai. The film makes an important point about the ambiguity of memory; even the most seemingly clear-cut situations can never be truly known, and all our attempts to bring order out of chaos by assembling events into a narrative are doomed from the beginning.

This will be important later. But for now, we start off in Switzerland, with our five teams setting out to a helipad for some good old-fashioned "hours of operation" bunching. Once that's out of the way, we start off with a Detour that involves trekking out into the trackless wastes of the Swiss Alps to rescue stranded tourists. (Or, more accurately, involves tourists trekking out to rescue actors/mannequins.) One option, Search, involves finding a buried mannequin and digging them up, while the other one, Rescue, involves one Racer lowering the other into a crevasse to "rescue" a probably very bored Swiss person.

Three teams (Kent/Vyxsin, Jen/Kisha, Flight Time/Big Easy) do Rescue. It's fairly easy, despite the editors' valiant attempts to recut Kent's whining into some sort of an actual crisis. It should be noted here that this is pretty much the point where killer fatigue and the arduous nature of the Race combine to boost Kent's natural whininess to intolerable levels. He's been getting gradually worse all season long, but this is the episode where it all goes off the rails and he hits "Perfect Storm" levels of general obnoxious whinging. He can't even put on his own hood when it gets windy.

The other two teams (Zev/Justin, Gary/Mallory) do Search...which proves to be longer and more difficult, to the point where I started to wonder if Zev and Justin weren't going to need to be rescued while they searched. Both teams managed to save their mannequin, though...if you don't count the tiny, insignificant fact that they broke him in half while "saving" him. This puts them at a major disadvantage when they get to the Road Block.

Which is another Travelocity-themed challenge (we usually get about one per season.) This time, they have to make a giant painted chocolate Roaming Gnome, using two molds that each team has one of their Racers paint, freeze, fill with chocolate, freeze again by putting in a snowbank, then split open to reveal the creepy misshapen parody of a human being within. Once they've done all that, they get a clue and a non-chocolate gnome, which they then take on foot to the Pit Stop.

This is where the Rashomon stuff comes in. Because the molds aren't labeled, the shelves in the freezers aren't labeled, and everyone is working at a frantic pace to get their gnomes painted. And one of the Racers, Flight Time, looks up at one point to find that what he thought was his gnome-half is actually Vyxsin's. Or, from his point of view, what Vyxsin thinks is her half is actually his. There ensues what could be the most confusing sequence in Race history; even the audience isn't clear on what happened to which gnome, at least judging by the Television Without Pity forum. All we know is that neither Flight Time nor Vyxsin got a penalty, so whatever happened, neither one took work that didn't belong to them. It seems pretty clear that Vyxsin put her work on the bottom shelf precisely so that she would know which one was hers, too. Beyond that, the universe simply does not allow us to know what happened. Narrative fractures and decoheres, and all we can be sure of is that both Big Easy and Kent were being whiny dicks to each other in accusing each other's teammates of theft.

We can also be clear that Kent and Vyxsin didn't read their clue carefully enough, because they took a taxi to the Pit Stop. (Still managing to arrive in third, impressively. Apparently some of the other teams are good runners.) Despite the fact that he was holding the clue when they got into the taxi, and that Vyxsin said repeatedly that something wasn't right about the situation when they passed other teams that were on foot, Kent insists for the entire half-hour that this is all Vyxsin's fault for not reading the clue carefully enough and that she's dragging him down with her negative attitude. That's right--the man who literally had to be carried through a Detour like a six-month-old is telling the woman who dragged his ass along that she's holding him back. This marks the official point where everyone in the world started rooting for their elimination simply so that Vyxsin could tell him to fuck off and never see him again.

And everyone got their wish. The half-hour penalty elapses, giving Gary and Mallory and Zev and Justin time to get to the Pit Stop while Kent is still explaining that he's being positive by blaming everything on his teammate. They're eliminated, and next week it looks like the last four teams go off to Brazil, then the last three teams go to the Florida Keys in a double-sized season finale!

Which will, of course, be broken up into two normal-sized episodes for subsequent syndication. But c'est la vie!

Possibly Contentious Buffy/Angel Question of the Day

2011-04-28T14:36:00.000-07:00

Would Spike have been a better character if they'd moved him to "Angel" right away with Season One, rather than waiting for Season Five?

My logic for asking is this: Spike's character began as a foil for Angel, an unrepentant (and in fact, downright gleeful) vampire who contrasts with Angel's "I am so tormented over my former evil and I has a soul now and it hurts hurts hurts!" demeanor. The twist at the end of Season Two works because Spike is so unrepentantly sadistic and evil--once Angel loses his soul, he becomes so utterly mad and destructive that even Spike has to change sides. If Spike thinks you've gone too far, you've gone too far.

But instead of making him a recurring foil and comic-relief figure in "Angel", they kept him in "Buffy" for the next four seasons, where he slowly transformed from a contrast to Angel into an Angel wannabe. He stopped being threatening to the Scoobies, then he became their ally, then he fell in love with Buffy, then he got back his soul. By the end of Season Seven, he was basically a blond version of Angel in Season Three.

Then he went over to "Angel", where they quickly realized that having a blond Angel and a dark and spiky-haired Angel was one Angel too many, so they had to go to great lengths to suddenly and wrenchingly turn Spike back into Spike. Which seems like a lot of work to go through, hence the question: Would they have been better off putting him in "Angel" right from the get-go, thus keeping the character more consistent and avoiding the pitfalls of giving him a soul, a chip, et cetera?

I'm leaning vaguely towards yes-ish, but I'm mostly interested in what others have to say.

Amazing Race Round-Up, 18-9

2011-04-27T08:58:00.000-07:00

Last time, we had six teams left on the Amazing Race. This time, we have...still six, because of a timely non-elimination leg that saved Gary and Mallory. Everyone seems pretty aware that they're not going to get that lucky again--I (and presumably all the Racers at this point) expect that it's going to be the last NEL of this Race, which is good because we've had three episodes where nobody got eliminated and I want blood. Blood! BLOOOOOOOOOOD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Metaphorically speaking, of course.

With that in mind, the six remaining teams left Austria and headed to Lichtenstein, home of the undead sorcerer...no, wait. There are no actual liches in Lichtenstein, are there? Dang. Just when you think they've found the coolest location for the Race...oh well. They head to the tiny little postage-stamp country of Lichtenstein for the next leg. How small? Well, let's find out! All six teams must measure the western border of Lichtenstein as their Road Block, riding motorized bicycles and measuring the distance on their odometers. Correctly navigate the 22 km course, you get the next clue. Screw up, and you go 22 km back to start and then 22 km back to the end and guess again.

As you can imagine, getting this one wrong is Very Bad. And it's around here where we say to ourselves, "What's the one problem that otherwise super-competent team Jet and Cord have had this season? Oh, right. Navigation." Sure enough, as we watch everyone navigate the course, we see Jet getting lost somewhere in the tiny country of Lichtenstein. And although he can't get too lost in a country that's actually smaller than some Oklahoma ranches, this is one case where precision pays.

"Ah," you say, "but what about the other teams? Surely someone is going to help him out by screwing up just as bad?" This is where the bit that left a little bit of a bad taste in my mouth comes in...Zev and Justin, who get it right, pass on the information to the Globetrotters (specifically Flight Time, if I recall correctly) who then lets Gary know. So of the six teams, only three got it right the first time (Vyxsin and Kisha both did it without help, although Kisha had her guess confirmed before submitting it), but only one had to do the course over. This seems a trifle unfair to me. There's no rule against it, there's nothing that says that other teams can't do a little kingmaking by getting rid of a team that's been almost supernaturally good at breezing through Detours and Road Blocks, but it still leaves me with some uncomfortable "what ifs" in a show that doesn't normally have them.

But the Cowboys made a good effort at catching up. They might have hit the Detour well after everybody else (probably an hour or so behind, given that it was a roughly 10-mile course and the Velosolex they used, while capable of high speeds, was probably being ridden at about 20 mph for safety's sake)...but man, did they catch up fast. The Detour was a choice between delivering luggage and eating an entire pot of cheese fondue, and they knuckled down and ran luggage around town like nobody's business.

Unfortunately, everyone had an hour's head start. Zev and Justin took the cheese (they were the only one, hence the old saying, "the cheese stands alone") and muscled through it in about an hour, with only one bout of vomiting. (Also legal, also leaving a bad taste in one's mouth, but for entirely different reasons.) Kent and Vyxsin did luggage and we saw again that Vyxsin is way more determined, way better suited to the physical challenges, and way less patient with her partner than her last time on the Race. At one point, she tells Kent to get on the empty luggage cart and literally drags him back to the checkpoint. That's right, after years of jokes about one partner carrying another, it's finally happened for real.

Oh, and at the end of the Detour right before the Pit Stop, there's a Double U-Turn. This is a brutal place to put a U-Turn; since it's right before the Pit Stop (not that the Racers knew, but...) anyone who gets U-Turned is pretty much left in the dust. There's nowhere left on the leg to make up the time. That's why they made it a Double-U-Turn; a single one would be like a sign saying, "Who do you want eliminated?"

Unfortunately for the Cowboys, the first four teams didn't use that U-Turn. Vyxsin and Kent couldn't, because you can only U-Turn once per race and they'd already used theirs to FUBAR the Cheerleaders, and the other three teams who got there early (Gary/Mallory, Jen/Kisha, Zev/Justin) decided that as long as they were doing okay, they weren't going to piss anyone else off by U-Turning them. Which meant that when the Globetrotters got to the checkpoint, mere minutes ahead of the Cowboys (well, at least that's how it was edited to look--they might have been further behind, but the Globetrotters did screw up the luggage task and had to deliver an extra two bags...) they knew exactly what to do. Put the game out of reach by slapping the Cowboys' picture up there.

So sure enough, the Cowboys arrived to see that they were DOA. They went back, had a nice, leisurely meal of cheese fondue, and checked in for their inevitable Philimination. Which is tough for them, since they mainly got eliminated because nobody wanted to help them the one time they needed it, but then again, maybe those people just had gay friends. (Yes, I went there.) And honestly, at this stage of the Race there are no "good" eliminations. Everyone goes out hurting.

Five teams left, next week is Switzerland, and apparently Kent gets into an argument with a guy big enough to use him as a toothpick. Good luck, Kent!

A Brief Clarification

2011-04-25T17:08:00.000-07:00

When River says, "I've never seen you looking so young," (in Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead), she's not referring to the physical age of his current incarnation. She's referring to the youthful, carefree demeanor he has about him--a demeanor she'll never see in him again, because this is the only time he ever meets her that he doesn't know, to the exact second, when she's going to die.

Please stop pointing out that Matt Smith is younger than David Tennant, because that is missing the point.

Staking Out a Bold Position

2011-04-22T17:30:00.000-07:00

It's Star Wars. It's just Star Wars, people. Yes, it was re-released as Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, but 28 Days Later was re-released as 29 Days Later when they put it back in theaters with the alternate endings and nobody calls it that. The standard naming convention for motion pictures is to call them by the title they were originally released under, then mention any alternate titles below that for means of convenience (such as Braindead, also released under the title Dead Alive.) Obsessively correcting everyone with, "Actually, it's A New Hope" isn't just pedantic and obnoxious, it's incorrect.

Star Wars. Ask for it by name.

Amazing Race Round-Up, 18-8

2011-04-20T17:33:00.000-07:00

We're down to...six teams, now? Wow. It's starting to get pretty easy to keep track of people, now that we've winnowed away almost half the field. In any event, those six teams started off in India, but now need to go to Vienna, Austria, where a Ford Focus commercial is waiting for them. Jet and Cord once again decide to spot all the other teams a head-start, this time by a half-hour, as they pick a different flight in the hopes that one or more people will miss a connection and give them an advantage. Instead, they hit Austria a half-hour behind everyone. Guys? Not that I actually want you to win, given your attitude towards gay people, but you are reaching that point in the Race where those are elimination mistakes instead of charmingly doofy mistakes.

The teams all get to Vienna, where they each get a brand new Ford Focus to drive, and are instructed to use its easy touch-screen system to get the next clue. This backfires slightly on Ford, as we then get a scene of Gary mildly swearing as he tries to figure out how to make the easy touch-screen system work. But eventually he figures it out, and all the teams head to an Austrian castle!

...where they get a book, which they're instructed to deliver to a library via Ford Focus. Is it just me, or is the product placement a little bit more intrusive this season? Other than the "lifetime supply of 7-Up" from Season 16, I can't think of another time they've been this much in your face with the sponsor's stuff. (Oh, and the prize for this week is a Ford Focus for each Racer...which isn't a lifetime supply, unless the Ford Focus is an amazingly reliable car. Or an unbelievable deathtrap.)

In any event, at the library, we finally ditch the Ford Focus to do the Detour. One option is to deliver a couch from the Freud Museum to the University of Vienna (presumably without a single Freudian slip.) The other option is to eat a lot of schnitzel and baked potatoes and chocolate cake. Not one, not two, but three teams forget the cardinal rule of the Amazing Race: The better the food in the eating challenge, the nastier the catch in the challenge has to be. In this case, it's a timed eating challenge. All three teams fail, giving everyone else (in specific, the Cowboys) a chance to catch up.

Everyone delivers their couches--and surprisingly, the Goths do so amidst much bitching at each other. Their relationship this time out is very different, and a lot less supportive. (Rumor has it that they aren't actually dating anymore, just pretending to for purposes of the show. I obviously don't know, but they're not acting very much like a couple. Except in the sense that Nick and Vicki acted like a couple.) Then it's back to the Ford Focus, to go to the Road Block! (I was half-expecting the couches to be delivered via the spacious cargo room of the Ford Focus!)

Unfortunately for Gary and Mallory, who got passed by the Cowboys, the Road Block turns out to be one of those simple, mechanistic, takes-everybody-about-the-same-amount-of-time tasks. Fortunately, this turns out to be the season's first official non-elimination leg. (At least, fortunately as far as I'm concerned. I know there are people who can't stand Mallory's squealing excitement, but I think she's sweet.) And next week, we're off to Switzerland to see if they can catch up!

We Need a New Word

2011-04-16T17:04:00.001-07:00

The other day, I got to thinking about South Africa. I don't even remember what prompted it, but it popped into mind (oh, wait! I do know what prompted it! The radio was playing Lionel Ritchie's song "All Night Long", and thanks to a childhood thoroughly corrupted by MAD Magazine, their South Africa-themed parody "All-White Song" popped into mind. Never let it be said that I am too deep and somber a thinker for a casual pop-culture blog.)

In any event, I thought about Apartheid, and was reminded of Reagan's stance against the boycott of South Africa. And it occurred to me that it was, in its own perverse way, a very courageous stance to take. I mean, by the 1980s, pretty much everybody had come around to the idea that state-supported racism was a Bad Thing...some more reluctantly than others, of course...but the idea to publicly stand up and say, "I support a governmental policy of institutional bigotry against all comers!" was one that took a lot of guts.

And Paul Ryan, the representative from Wisconsin, is showing a similar degree of courage. It takes real guts to stand up and say, "I don't care who's against it--I'm going to loot the public treasury and leave America's elderly to die like dogs, and I'm funneling the proceeds to my millionaire cronies!" Most people would balk at that kind of stance, hedge on it to some degree at least, but not Ryan. He's boldly going forward with a plan despite the vast, principled opposition of over 80% of the voting public.

I propose that we coin the phrase "immoral courage" for this sort of behavior, a counterpart to the more commonly recognized "moral courage". It is rare, in this day and age, to find someone who is willing to be unabashedly, unrepentantly evil despite the very real risk of political and personal consequences for their actions, and such courage needs to be recognized.

Not applauded, of course. Just recognized.

Amazing Race Round-Up, 18-7

2011-04-12T07:27:00.000-07:00

And after a two-week delay, we get going again! (I mean "we" as in the viewers, natch. I don't think they actually made the Racers sit down and wait for the Country Music Awards to finish. Actually, this episode was live-tweeted by Phil himself, as @PhilKeoghan, and he said it takes about 23 days for the Racers to go around the world. Um, suck it, Jules Verne?)

This time, we started with a little airport drama--Jet and Cord didn't ask the right questions at the ticket counter, and wound up on a flight an hour later than all the other teams. Ordinarily, this would be a cause for concern, except that a) I'm not really rooting for the Cowboys, because they were apparently the recipient of favorable editing their first time around that covered for their homophobic tendencies, and b) even if I were, I wouldn't be that concerned because they do have a tendency to make up whatever time they lose in navigational ineptitude by being that much better at the tasks than everyone else.

And sure enough, they made up their mistake in the Road Block (a fairly standard needle-in-a-haystack challenge where the teams had to find specific people in a crowd.) Ron, meanwhile, tanked it very seriously, coming out of the Road Block in dead last. But surely nobody else could make that many screw-ups, right?

Well, it was actually kind of close. Because while Kent and Vyxsin are by no means inept, they are not communicating and co-operating nearly as well as they did on their first run. Vyxsin has less patience with Kent (it does seem to be common knowledge that they're not dating anymore, despite what the show says) and Kent seems to have less enthusiasm for the Race. The two of them are making more mistakes, and handling their mistakes less well--that said, Vyxsin's decision to jump into the Ganges rather than continue going down the river the wrong direction was pretty gutsy.

(Oh, and there was a Detour involving buffalo manure. This was about the only interesting thing about it.)

In the end, though, Ron and Christina couldn't psychically convince the other teams to make enough mistakes to catch up after the disastrous Road Block, and they were duly eliminated. This does not break my heart. While Ron wasn't as bad as I heard he was the first time he was on the Race, he certainly wasn't that good. Unfortunately, the only thing we'll continue to see of them is their faces on the credits, which is my least favorite thing about them--Christina's smile is so fixed and wide, it looks like she's been replaced by an Auton duplicate of herself or something.

Next week, Kent and Vyxsin yell at each other some more, and Gary and Mallory eat a lot. Oh, and they're in Austria. I've always liked the European legs of the Race, so this should be fun.

Hipster Zombie Only Listens To Singers That Are Dead

2011-04-10T16:29:00.001-07:00

Leaping onto the "Hipster Ariel" trend (I'm no expert at image modifying, but you get the idea):

And for those who want to do it themselves:

Half-Hearted Song Parodies Still Count, Right?

2011-04-09T16:48:00.000-07:00

I'll probably come back to this at some point to do the other verses, but I'm concerned that if I don't post the beginning now while I can still remember it, I'll forget that part too. So...

Way out in outer space, so far away from here,
On a far-off distant planet past the Sense-O-Sphere,
In a tiny little igloo made of ice and wood,
There lived an alien name of Johnny B Ood,
And he never ever learned to read and write so well,
But his telepathy song was just as clear as a bell.

Go go! Go, Johnny go! Go! Go...Johnny B Ood!

Things I Miss: UHF

2011-04-06T18:35:00.000-07:00

Not the movie. I own that. No, I miss UHF TV stations. They're still around, of course, but they're not the same as they were when I was a kid. Back before UPN and the WB and the CW (which is, like, the WB and UPN combined like Voltron, right?) there were only three networks (four, counting PBS)...but something like nine channels in any given area as you flipped through the VHF and UHF dials. Which meant that you had, at any given time, four or five channels that weren't network affiliates to anyone.

Pretty much all those networks showed the same thing: Re-runs of old television shows and cheap movies well past their theatrical prime. This was back before first-run syndicated shows like "Star Trek: The Next Generation", when the shows you were more likely to see on a UHF station were things like "Perry Mason", "F Troop", and...well, okay, "Voltron". Because old Japanese cartoons were cheap, too. The days were filled with a surprisingly random selection of TV shows, the evenings were reserved for movies that, in a pre-video era, you probably hadn't seen and wouldn't mind watching. It was sort of like being in a room with someone else's streaming Netflix subscription.

Which was fun in and of itself (in a way that has obviously been far surpassed by today's five hundred channels of cable, DVDs of virtually every single TV series and most movies, and streaming online videos)...but the best part was the way that these old UHF stations distinguished themselves from their competitors. They didn't have original programming, they didn't have original movies, all they had was a library of old stuff that was virtually indistinguishable from everyone else's...and a group of underpaid, bored people with video cameras.

This was a recipe for awesome.

The advertisements were usually great; one of our local stations, Channel 41 (which only came in grainy, staticky, and vertical-hold challenged) called themselves "TV Heaven" and suggested that they were where good television shows went when they died. Another had ads for "Star Trek" re-runs where they advertised the Amazing "Bones" McCoy! "He's an escalator!" "I'm a doctor, not an escalator!" "He's a diplomat!" "I'm a doctor, not a diplomat!" "And he can even shuttle traffic to the moon!" "What am I, a doctor or a moon shuttle conductor!" What they lacked in steak, they made up in sizzle. And it was fun.

And when it came to movies...some people claim that comics are the truly American art form, but I think that horror hosts are almost more American than comic books. Whether Vampira, Svengoolie, Ghoulardi or Elvira, they treated classic horror movies with the mix of love and amusement they deserved. And I, of course, feel privileged as hell to have been a viewer of the ultimate evolution of the horror host phenomenon, the one-season wonder that made it good on a national scale, "Mystery Science Theater 3000". (Lucky me, right?)

It's cheesy, it's silly, and arguably everything about these networks is better now...but part of me feels like TV stations used to have more personality when that's all they had to work with. I liked these old UHF stations that ran things on the cheap, and part of me still misses them.

Rural Kentucky Begins "That Boy Ain't Right" Awareness Month

2011-04-01T17:23:00.000-07:00

Disassociated Press, KY

Once again, rural Kentucky has announced that April is "That Boy Ain't Right" Awareness Month. "Although the number of incidences of 'That Boy Ain't Right' Syndrome have once again decreased, we still have a number of children in rural Kentucky that, for whatever reason, ain't right in the head," said Big Jim Crenshaw, chief of the Not Right In the Head Research Institute. "We hope to raise awareness of this serious condition, and explain the treatment options to parents of boys that aren't right in the head."

While it was once common nationwide to see boys and girls who simply weren't right in the head, the number of cases has gone down at approximately the same rate as the rise in cases of autism, schizophrenia, attention deficit disorder, Asperger's syndrome, separation anxiety disorder, Tourette Syndrome, and similar other behavioral disorders. Only a few pockets of "That Boy Ain't Right" Syndrome remain in the United States; tragically, most of these areas suffer from a lack of qualified mental health professionals, making it even harder to diagnose and treat children who aren't right in the head.

Symptoms of "That Boy Ain't Right" Syndrome vary widely, but can include screaming fits, dull stupors, biting, never having been that bright, exposing themselves in public, or simply daydreaming about a life outside of the misery and deprivation of rural Kentucky, one where all the houses have electricity and running water and nobody beats them up at school for liking poetry.

Says Big Jim, "We try to remind parents that contrary to established medical consensus, recent findings have shown that most cases of 'That Boy Ain't Right' Syndrome can't be cured by whupping the crazy out of 'em. We've been studying the effectiveness of exorcism, but in the meanwhile, we recommend that you just try to be patient and don't get too close to Billy Wilkins, 'cause he's a biter. Oh, and don't give sugar to little Susie. Not unless you want to stay up until 4 AM with her."

Amazing Race Round-Up, 18-6

2011-03-29T19:00:00.000-07:00

Okay, I lied. This is the kind of leg that must be hard for the editors to make look interesting.

On the one hand, I thought it was a very well-designed Road Block. It was a needle in a haystack challenge, but one that didn't rely purely on chance--the racers could, if they had paid attention back in China and remembered the taste, scent, and color of the tea they had drunk the previous day, solve it very quickly and easily (as Ron did. Yes, I know, Ron is not completely useless! We are all equally amazed here, including Christina.) But if they just swigged down the tea and ran for the plane, and they didn't remember what it tasted like, well...they were going to be drinking tea until they cried. Literally.

At that point, it really just came down to "Is this a NEL/double leg?" Because the Detour was not hard enough to give the last-place team a chance to catch up, and that meant that unless it was a NEL, Margie and Luke were screwed. And we found out that it wasn't a double leg pretty early on, and we haven't seen any plan NELs this season. So we spent a whole lot of time suspecting strongly that Margie and Luke were screwed.

At this point, I'm beginning to suspect that the final three will be Zev/Justin, Jet/Cord, and Gary/Mallory. All three have been running strong races leg after leg, and while it does take just one bad leg to put you out of the running (as with last season, where Gary/Mallory just got epically lost and washed out), they don't seem to be prone to that. Whereas everyone else has been kind of trying to come in "not last", it seems, which only works as a strategy for so long.

Next week, no Race, which means no Race recap. But in two weeks, more Race! And Zev apparently gets annoyed by loud noises. Oooh.

I Do Not Make Friends Easily

2011-03-27T09:22:00.001-07:00

Recently, in my capacity as guest commentator on Mightygodking.com, I posted a review of the novel Ravenous that was, to put it lightly, not positive. In the comments section, an author named Steven Spruill took issue with my opinion of the novel, suggesting in no uncertain terms that my lack of enjoyment of the novel was due to my inexperience with the written form, and that Professional Authors such as himself knew better about its quality. A lively discussion ensued from there.

(It should be noted that the actual author of the novel, Ray Garton, has not involved himself in the discussion, presumably being far too classy to get into a dust-up with every person who gives his books a bad review. One rule I've learned, over a decade or so of reading and writing in a medium that allows fans and creators an unprecedented opportunity to interact, is that it is never a good idea to respond to a bad review in any way other than saying, "Thanks for your feedback." You will not convince people that your book is better than the reviewer says it is, but you will convince them that you are petty, small-minded, and unpleasant.)

(And for the record, no, this is not my opinion of Steven Spruill. I think he's possibly being a bit overzealous in defense of his friend, and his attempts to throw his weight around as a Professional Author are faintly pathetic, but I don't think he's a bad person or anything. He just has a few lessons to learn about how far your reputation will take you in Internet discussions, and I think he's learning them now.)

But one thing he said did have weight, and I wanted to address it here. He pointed out that it was unfair of me to call Ray Garton an "inept" author, based solely on a single novel out of the sixty-plus that Garton has had published. In this, at least, he is absolutely right; it is unfair to judge Garton's talent on the basis of one novel. The only answer I can give is: Life isn't fair.

I don't mean that in a trite, dismissive way; I mean it in the sense that the reader of a story is not in any way obligated to the author of a story. In fact, it's the exact opposite; the author is asking for the reader's time and (frequently) money, and is obligated to the reader to provide an experience that is worth that time and money. Authors don't get to put a little note in the front of the book that says, "Look, this one is actually an old manuscript of mine that the publisher dusted off once I got famous, but it's really not my best work, so don't expect too much out of it." They don't get to sit down and tell the reader before he/she starts reading, "Oh, this one? Man, I totally locked up on the last forty pages. But deadline was already two weeks ago when I got to that point, and so I just pushed through and got something down on the page and called it good. Really sorry, but it's going to disappoint the hell out of you." They do not have the luxury of expecting the reader to give them a second chance--heck, they don't really have the luxury of expecting the reader to give them a first chance. Every opportunity to impress a reader is a precious gift, and should be treated as such.

Amazing Race Round-Up, 18-5

2011-03-21T16:25:00.000-07:00

So when last we left Kent and Vyxsin, they were in last place with a second leg coming up and a missing passport. Could they find their passport? Could they make up the missing time on the second half of the double leg? And who would be penalized for breaking Race rules?

As it turned out, the answers were about as anticlimactic as you can get, at least for the first two questions. Kent and Vyxsin found their fanny pack and made it to the Pit Stop, only to find that they were still racing and that the next "task" involved going to a train station where the producers had arranged for some truly spectacular bunching. And I mean truly spectacular. Even Kent and Vyxsin didn't stand a chance of missing this one.

Don't get me wrong, I think that bunching (the practice of giving teams that are behind a chance to catch up by putting everyone on the same train, plane, bus, boat, et cetera; or arranging hours of operation for the location of the next task so that everyone has to wait for the place to open in order to start the task) is necessary sometimes. If you never bunched, you'd have a situation where the really good teams would wind up with an insurmountable lead by the sixth leg or so, to the point where Phil would have to sub-contract eliminations to a second host while he went on ahead to check in the leading teams. But a double-leg is supposed to be a continuation of the previous leg, an endurance test as well as a chance for teams that are behind to make up ground. Starting every double-leg with "go to the train station/airport and wait fifteen hours" turns something that should be difficult into a glorified non-elimination leg, with the added benefit that the last team doesn't get a Speed Bump. I'm actually pretty disappointed in the way this turned out.

That said, Kent and Vyxsin did earn a thirty-minute penalty for taking the wrong flight. (The rule used to be that your penalty was equal to the time saved by taking alternate means of transport. If that had happened here, Kent and Vyxsin would have jumped forward several places due to penalty.) The producers were at least maintaining the pretense of double-legs being challenging, so instead of serving it during the meaningless Pit Stop, they were informed that it would be waiting for them at the end of the next leg.

After an inconsequential-but-adorable sequence of the teams waiting for the train (they played three-on-three, with a Globetrotter on each team and Jaime and Cara acting as cheerleaders) they moved on to the next destination, all nine at once. They then had a second detour, which was a memory challenge on one side and a lift-and-haul-heavy-things-then-assemble-them challenge on the other side. Oh, and there was a Double U-Turn (also known as "the only fair U-Turn") waiting at the other end of this one.

Surprisingly, it wasn't much of a factor. Perhaps this was because several teams got spectacularly lost between the Detour and the Road Block (the two teams that got U-Turned actually wound up in sixth and seventh, ahead of Zev/Justin and Gary/Mallory--they tried to follow Ron/Christina instead of getting directions themselves, and their cab drivers turned out not to be that good at following.) Perhaps it was because the memory challenge didn't throw many teams; I was assuming we were going to see lots of slow, sad head shakes from the guy with the clues, but most teams seemed to get it fairly quickly.

The Road Block, on the other hand, was a major challenge. It involved assembling a giant 3-D dinosaur puzzle (actual dinosaur size, in fact) and all the teams were working at it when the last team arrived. Said last team was Gary/Mallory, who promptly assessed their odds and said "Screw it, we'd rather use the Express Pass than get eliminated." It was a wise idea; even skipping the Road Block, they still wound up in second. (This is a bad sign, actually; when Gary and Mallory got eliminated last time, it was due to major problems with navigation and not any issues with the tasks. If they got lost twice on this leg, it means they haven't gotten rid of that weakness, and they don't have another Express Pass to help them recover.)

In any event, the dinosaur assembly turned out to be harder than expected, mainly because they were all working off of one picture of the finished product and half the teams didn't do a good job checking their work. When it comes to lifesize puzzles made of very big chunks of heavy wood, the last thing you want to find out is that you put the hips on backwards. Lots of teams had problems, but in the end, it was Jaime and Cara whose problems turned out to be insurmountable. They reached the Pit Stop exhausted, grumpy (Jaime actually said that "things never go our way", which is a pretty impressive statement for a team that finished second in their first race and a respectable ninth in their next attempt) and, of course, last. They were Philiminated, meaning that I'll thankfully never have to see another Jaime-tantrum again.

Next week, India, where Luke seems to be having terrible difficulties with the Road Block. Which means, given my theory on Amazing Race trailers, that they are the one team safe from elimination next week. See you then!

Someday They'll Get the Cybermen Right, Right?

2011-03-17T15:50:00.000-07:00

I'm still waiting for a really good Cybermen story on Doctor Who. (On TV, that is. "Spare Parts" got it right on audio, in ways that I'm about to explain.) Oh, sure, we've had lots of stories where the Cybermen show up, and even some where they do somewhat interesting things, but it says a lot that the coolest Cybermen story I can think of is mainly memorable for them getting their butts kicked by the Daleks.

The problem is that nobody really seems to understand what makes the Cybermen work, and I include their creators. The horror of the Cybermen isn't that they're tough, or that they have laser blasters, or that they have a cool catchphrase (which, apart from anything else, they don't. "DELETE!" sounds like the off-brand Dalek knock-offs.) The horror of the Cybermen is that what they do makes perfect sense. They want to convert every human being into a Cyberman because they genuinely know--not just believe, know--that it willl improve their existences, and they will never stop because they know they're right. The horror of the Cybermen isn't, "DELETE DELETE DELETE", it's "You will become like us."

But everyone writes them like big stompy villains who sneer and boast and preen and strut. For bad guys who aren't supposed to have emotions, they certainly seem to get upset a lot whenever anyone challenges their worldview. Instead, they should be calm, remorseless, and entirely certain in the rightness of their attitude. To the Cybermen, human beings are suffering from a mental illness that makes them irrationally attached...to irrationality, ironically enough. These poor people believe that their brain disorder somehow gives their life meaning, and need to be forced to undergo conversion for their own good. It's unfortunate that they can't understand how much better life is with a superior body and none of the distractions of emotion, but they will. Once they undergo the process, they'll understand just how much sense it makes. And then they'll help to convert others.

My idea for a Cybermen story involves a small group of Cybermen setting up shop on a space station, promising that they will not use violence or force, and simply asking people to volunteer for the process--convincing them, through the logic of their position. Yes, being a Cyberman means an end to joy, but it also means an end to fear, an end to rage, an end to misery and suffering and pain and sorrow and all the weaknesses of the flesh. There are some people who would gladly give up their flesh and blood if it just meant the pain would stop.

Their endgame plan, of course, would be to convert the unwilling by force once they had enough recruits. Because deception, while again unfortunate, is sometimes necessary when dealing with the irrational. It's like dealing with a madman, sometimes. But the Cybermen have a cure for that.

Amazing Race Round-Up, 18-4

2011-03-15T15:43:00.000-07:00

I suspect this one must have been a difficult one for the editors; it's always tricky when one team gets way behind the others. Do you try to use clever editing techniques in order to make it seem like the lagging team is closer than they are, or do you just go ahead and acknowledge that there's not going to be much suspense in this episode and show how far behind they really are?

In the case of Kent and Vyxsin, the team that pretty much dominated this week's episode, the situation was complicated by some major bunching that kept them at least theoretically in the race long after what should have been sheer, unmitigated disaster. Driving a full three hours in the wrong direction and missing the flight that every single one of the other teams was on should have meant doom, full stop. (Especially since the subsequent flight wasn't for five hours. You do not want to spot everyone else a five-hour lead on the Amazing Race.) But when everyone else has to wait for an 8 AM bus, suddenly some of that lead gets eaten away, and it's worth focusing on the drama of whether or not running one of the worst legs in Race history is enough to get Kent and Vyxsin eliminated.

And it was a spectacular trainwreck of a leg. Vyxsin starts by insisting the theme for the day is "Positive Mental Attitude", then proceeds to get lost, sob into the map, scream at herself, stare into space, sob at the map some more, give up, lose her passport temporarily, and then berate herself a lot more while attempting the Road Block. Kent, meanwhile, has decided that the best way to deal with a partner who's having difficulties is to stare into space and wander around like an automaton, then say to her, "Well, I was just doing what you told me to do." (In case I haven't made it obvious yet, Kent's checking out was just as bad as Vyxsin's freaking out.) Oh, and then he loses his passport for good measure.

Next to all that, everyone else's mistakes seemed like amusing larks. Ron had his bizarre food cravings (I get that he's a fan of the local cuisine and doesn't get to eat Chinese food this authentic very often, but the man was actually stopping on the way to a Detour to smell the fish frying. I think if Christina had one of those toddler leashes for him, she'd have used it.) The Globetrotters didn't know what sign of the Chinese Zodiac they were (they've never gotten bored at a Chinese restaurant?) Mallory screamed, Jen admitted that there's really no way to feel good about yourself after calling a deaf guy a bitch, and the only racers who had any real trouble were Zev and Justin, and even they were way ahead of Kent and Vyxsin by the end.

(Assuming penalties don't come into play. Kent and Vyxsin might get a penalty for not taking the mandatory flight, although to me the penalty should be the five hours they had to wait for the next flight, and Justin might get a penalty for throwing one of his charms in the grass when he found out it was a duplicate, thus making it potentially harder for Vyxsin to find hers. Oh, and Ron and Christina might get a penalty for flinging themselves out of a moving trolley and throwing rocks at a bus to get it to stop instead of going back and taking the bus all the way like the clue said. No, really. They actually did that.)

And then, of course, we find out that the end isn't the end after all. Yes, for the first time in Race history, we get two double legs! (Which has led to some speculation that there will be no non-elimination legs, only double legs. That's a pretty big advantage to the teams at the back--no Speed Bumps!) Which means that Kent and Vyxsin are saved for another week. Even better for them, next week's leg includes a Double U-Turn (the only fair kind, in my opinion--being U-Turned is such a huge disadvantage that the only way to keep it from being "automatically eliminate one team" is to make it a double-team penalty)...and frankly, given how inept Kent and Vyxsin were this week, nobody's going to see them as enough of a threat to U-Turn.

Boiling It Down

2011-03-13T12:31:00.000-07:00

The United States government collects money in the form of taxes, to "pay the Debts and provide for the common defence and general Welfare of the United States". That's a nice, vague, catch-all term, made deliberately vague by a group of men who wanted their government to be flexible enough to adapt to a number of future situations; the general point, though, is that there's a lot of United States, which means there's a lot of taxes and a lot of people who need their general welfare provided for...which means that there's a whole hell of a lot of money that the US collects and spends.

A small group of wealthy private citizens are bribing politicians (predominantly Republicans, although there are certainly a few guilty Democrats) to take a large chunk of that money and hand it over to those wealthy private citizens in the form of tax breaks, subsidies, and similar. The politicians then use the resultant budget deficit to justify cutting spending for the purposes that the money was originally collected for--in essence, looting the public treasury with both hands through the use of creative book-keeping. Those wealthy private citizens, in turn, skim off a chunk of the money that the Republicans have embezzled for them and pass it back to the politicians in the form of "campaign contributions", thus completing the circuit and starting the process again.

This is not fiscal responsibility. This is not austerity. This is not good governance. This is a small group of wealthy criminal masterminds who have figured out that if you make the laws, then what you're doing can't be considered illegal. The Republican party has been almost thoroughly co-opted by these crooks, and they are stealing from widows, orphans, the poor and the sick in order to get a cut of the loot. Don't listen to what they say--heck, don't listen to what I say, either. Follow the money, and look at where it goes and who it comes from. Because that's the only thing that really matters.

Amazing Race Round-Up, 18-3

2011-03-08T16:20:00.000-08:00

Another week, another week of "The Amazing Race"! This time, we're off to Japan...well, eventually we are. The first half-hour of the show this week was really "The Amazing Hang Around Airports and Discuss Strategy". Not that I minded one hundred percent, because it was actually kind of interesting to see some of the strategizing involved in the Race. Basically, for those of you who missed it, the Racers had a choice of two different flights. One had a connecting flight in Hong Kong (not a tight connection, but a connection nonetheless) but got in at 6:00 AM local time. The other was direct, but didn't get in until 6:15. The question was, is it worth risking the complications of a connection for a fifteen-minute lead?

Long story short, no. It wasn't. The "leading" flight got seriously delayed, putting the five teams who tried to get ahead pretty seriously behind for the entire Tokyo leg. Which was a shame, because some of my favorite teams were on that second flight, and I spent a lot of the back half of the episode twitching. (Except for the time I spotted Zev's "Duck Whisperer" T-shirt, which was just pure awesome.) (It's a reference to their first time on the Race, when they had to herd ducks. If I ever go on the Race, I am wearing nothing but obscure geek reference T-shirts. "I'm Bill Pardy" for the million, baby!)

The next big chunk of the episode was, "Who can drive around Japan best?" This was not Jaime and Cara, who actually took the sideview mirror off a local's car. This was not the best team to be involved in a minor traffic fracas, given that the first time she was on the Race, Jaime expressed her frequent anger at people who had the nerve to speak only the language of the country they lived in. So getting into a car accident, even the most minor one, with someone who spoke no English and wouldn't just accept a wad of bills from a strange woman. (Not even one who said, in sing-song, loud, slowly spoken English, "Maybe if we give you some mon-ey?") Oh, this also featured one of the two...interesting editing choices of the episode. Jaime is explaining that they have to stop, "because..." and it cuts ahead to her already out of the car. Now, I'm assuming that they were editing out some sort of technical explanation of the rules on how Racers interact with local laws, but why keep the "because" then? Oh, well.

Finally, we do get to the Road Block, which is one of the "do as I do" variety. Racers performed a little samurai kata, then fired a bow at a target from a very short distance. (While being spun, admittedly, but still a very short distance. If anyone missed, they didn't show it.) They did show lots of people failing the kata, though. Repeatedly. This provided much of the excitement of the episode, giving many teams a big chance to catch back up.

Then they drove to the Detour, a choice between another "do as I do" task (this one involved performing a purity ritual under a freezing waterfall) and a "needle in a haystack" task, which involved rooting around in mud for a small ceramic frog, while being pelted with more mud by locals. Surprisingly, only two teams opted for the freezing waterfall. Yes, I understand, I wouldn't want to have to stand under a waterfall for a full minute in 45-degree water, shouting strange Japanese phrases either. But you know what? There's a little rule I have about the Amazing Race, which is, "If you can do something that's not a 'needle in a haystack' task, don't do the 'needle in a haystack' task." Because sure, you can find the frog quickly and be out of there in five minutes...but you can also spend two, three, four hours rooting around in cold mud until you get hypothermia and have to stop, and then another team passes you by and gets the frog. Hypothetically speaking.

Still, since just about everyone did the frog task, it wasn't such a big deal. Zev and Justin took first, the Globetrotters would have taken third but for an after-the-fact penalty involving them accidentally taking another racer's stuff...which resulted in the second interesting editing choice. See, when the Globetrotters checked in, the Race judges didn't know they'd done it. So they didn't have to wait out a penalty, as rule-breakers usually do. Instead, Ron and Christina showed up at the Pit Stop complaining about the Globetrotters, and Phil announced that he would give them a half-hour penalty as a result, putting Ron and Christina into third. Or, at least, he seemed to...but we don't see his face while he's making this announcement, and Ron and Christina are distinctly unmoved by their good fortune. Almost as if he actually told them he'd look into it, and the decision to penalize them was made afterwards and dubbed in. Could it be?

In the end, it's Mike and Mel who get the hypothermia instead of the frog, and Jaime and Cara who slip by them to avoid elimination. I'm sad, because Mike and Mel are genuinely class acts (and Phil clearly agrees...he doesn't choose favorites, but you can usually tell from his body language who he's having fun talking to and who makes his job more of a job than usual)...but on the other hand, I did not expect Mel to get far at seventy. The Race is intensely physical, and even a fit, athletic seventy-year-old is going to have trouble with that.

So now we're at nine. Next week, China, and what promises to be an epic tantrum from Ron!

Probably Unfair CNN Post

2011-03-03T15:28:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned on mightygodking, I've been watching a lot of CNN at work lately. (While working--it's not like I just sneak off to the breakroom and veg out all day.) They've been covering the Libya situation, and while I can appreciate that there's a case to be made for intervention, I gotta say, it really does seem like CNN is pushing like hell for the USA to go to war ASAP.

Which makes a certain amount of sense. Let's face it, CNN made its rep off of Desert Storm, and they're probably best known for their determined, courageous war reporting. To CNN, a war might mean dead soldiers, tragedy, and the failure of everything fine and noble about the human spirit, but it also means ratings, Emmys, and the very real possibility that one of their reporters will become a sex symbol as he bravely reports from inside Tripoli as the bombs fall. And that's a trade I feel like CNN will take any day.

I'm willing to admit that I could be wrong, but when you hear their tones of voice as they talk about "establishing a no-fly zone", or "arming the Libyan rebels"...they almost sound eager. It's a little creepy, especially for an outfit that prides itself on its non-partisan, non-agenda'd reporting. Democrat, Republican, the important thing at CNN seems to be, "So when are you going to start the shootin' match?"

Amazing Race Round-Up, 18-2

2011-03-01T15:02:00.000-08:00

Sorry for the lack of a Thursday post, but I got sick with a fast-moving virus Thursday morning which I'm just now recovering from. While I was too sick to write, move, or do much beyond sit on the couch and play "Plants Vs. Zombies" (my Tree of Wisdom is almost 600 feet tall!) I decided I'd devote the Monday post to the current season of "The Amazing Race" while it's in season, because a) I like the show and like talking about it, b) it means I have to only think of one vaguely clever thing a week, and c) why not? (Those of you offering up, "Because I don't care about 'The Amazing Race'" as an answer to c) can be comforted with the knowledge that there will still be one post a week that is not Race-related.) The post will be a mix of recap, discussion, and snark, blended according to mood.

I discussed the first episode on Mightygodking last week, and it left off with a big cliffhanger: The teams checked in at the Pit Stop had already discovered that they were on a double-leg, so they had to keep racing with no chance to rest! And Jet and Cord, the only team who hadn't yet made it to the Pit Stop, were falling further and further behind as the Road Block continued to stump them!

And this episode, we see that the next challenge...was to find the place to sign up for the charter flight that left the next morning. I have to say, I was really disappointed, and not just because I'm rooting against Jet and Cord because they're homophobic idjits. After a first episode that established quite well that this Race was going to be tougher and more grueling than usual, due to all the seasoned Racers, bunching them all up again essentially turned the double-leg into a non-elimination leg, rescuing Jet and Cord from a spectacular foul-up without even the penalty of a Speed Bump.

The Detour did somewhat make up for it, though, being a well-designed choice between a fiddly detail-oriented task that would take a while and reward staying calm under pressure...and something that sounded kind of icky, and could be tricky, but could also be completed very quickly for those willing to try it. (Which was exactly one team, and them only because they had to. But hey.) Pretty much everything we'd already seen of these teams was on display again; Ron and Christina bickered non-stop, Flight Time and Big Easy took everything in good humor, Jaime and Cara got frustrated easily with people who weren't helpful even though said people weren't there to be helpful to begin with, et cetera et cetera.

After the Detour, we had a very good navigation task--I like that the destination was expressed in the form of highlighting elements on the Periodic Table and forcing the Racers to figure it out. Of course, nowadays that just means stopping a passerby and asking to borrow their smartphone for a moment, but let's face it, that's the world these days. It's just about impossible to keep the Racers away from the Internet, and honestly, I'm not sure it's such a bad thing. Without the Internet and sympathetic passers-by, about half the teams would wind up standing around for hours, arguing about whether or not Hg stood for Hydrogen. Which yes, does separate the men and women from the boys and girls, but makes for boring television.

Oh, and they all had to find the intersection while wearing kangaroo costumes. Probably didn't make it that much more challenging, but a lot more amusing.

Then it was just a race to the Pit Stop, and despite my hopes that we'd see a swift exit for Ron and Christina (well, Ron, at least; Christina could stay, but Ron was being rude not just to his own daughter but to Mallory to boot) ...it was Amanda and Kris who made the exit. So basically the U-Turn again proves to be fatal, which is why they should use the Double-U-Turn from last season instead. As it is, the presence of a U-Turn almost removes all the suspense from an episode.

On the one hand, it's a bummer that Perfectly Nice Couple Amanda and Kris went home while there are at least four teams (Jet and Cord, Ron and Christina, Kisha and Jen, Jaime and Cara) that I'm actively rooting against. On the other hand, I can at least take some comfort that none of the teams I'm actively rooting for (Margie and Luke, Flight Time and Big Easy, Kent and Vyxsin, Mel and Mike) went out, especially given that Mel still looks like he's about to collapse in a heap at any second.

Next week, Jaime and Cara appear to run someone over. Presumably, Jaime will get out of the car and berate them for slowing her down. And then berate them again for not screaming in English.

The Problem With the Tea Party

2011-02-21T15:41:00.000-08:00

Their rhetoric talks about "taking back government for 'we the people'," but their platform is more about "I the person" than "we the people". The whole idea that government was founded on, that of people uniting to do important things that they can't do by themselves, is conspicuous by its absence. Which almost certainly wasn't what the Founders intended; after all, the very first line of the Constitution talks about forming "a more perfect Union".

Not busting one.

The Grim Truth About "Atlas Shrugged"

2011-02-14T15:35:00.000-08:00

Nobody would notice or care what happened to John Galt, because the world runs perfectly well without a rich douchebag telling it what to do.

And within about a week, he'd be dead, because rich douchebags like him are so used to people doing things like washing their clothes, cooking their food, and cleaning their houses that they wouldn't know what to do without them.

The book appeals to rich douchebags because it validates their egotism: "Of course I'm harder-working, smarter, and more important than everyone else! Otherwise, how would I have gotten so rich? I should be allowed to do exactly what I want, and answer to nobody but other rich people, because civilization depends on me."

When in fact, they depend on millions of people that they don't even notice. Their whole existence is an exercise in ignoring all the people that enable their lifestyle, and the people best suited to do that are not the brilliant, but the sociopathic. And in fact, when you look at the actual plot of the story, John Galt fits the part perfectly--his primary goal is to destroy human civilization as punishment for not recognizing his achievements, and he's presented as the hero. Ayn Rand has a lot to answer for.

Bad Super Bowl Joke

2011-02-07T18:33:00.000-08:00

This is the problem with having such an overachieving quarterback on your team. Ben Roethlisberger was trying to see if he could be the MVP of both the Steelers and the Packers.

(In all seriousness, it's not so much that I was rooting against the Packers as it is that Packers fans tend to be insufferably smug about their team even when the record doesn't justify it. I hate to see what they're going to be like when they've actually accomplished something.)

(On the other hand, it is nice to see Aaron Rodgers stick it to the overrated, over-the-hill Brett Favre. Guess we'll call it a wash.)

Rhyme Assistance!

2011-02-03T15:33:00.000-08:00

There's a song I've been hearing a lot lately at work. (KDWB--your place to go for one of up to six different songs!) It's a gentleman who's quite upset about the lack of emotional support he's getting from his girlfriend, relative to that which he gives her. He claims he would "catch a grenade for ya", and "throw my hand on a blade for ya", but after that he runs out of good rhymes and needs to resort to "jump in front of a train for ya" before claiming that she wouldn't do the same. (Incidentally, two points on this: One, most women care more about whether you'll run out to the store at 2 AM to get them donuts than whether or not you'll throw yourself in front of locomotives; and two, if you have actual first-hand knowledge of whether or not your girlfriend will catch a grenade for you, her lack of commitment is the least of your worries.)

In any event, I've decided to help the gentleman out by giving some other things that he would do for her. Such as...

"do time in a stockade for ya"

"drink some pink lemonade for ya"

"spray a cockroach with Raid for ya"

"put my hair in a braid for ya"

"wear a garlic pomade for ya"

"get pets neutered or spayed for ya"

"perform at Farm Aid for ya"

"take a nap in the shade for ya"

"lose my shirt in a trade for ya"

"sing a serenade for ya"

"dodge, parry, spin and evade for ya"

"freshen my room with Glade for ya"

"get all my clothing frayed for ya"

"score a high passing grade for ya"

"carve a statue of jade for ya"

I hope this helps. Although I understand that it makes it even more likely that she would not, in fact, do the same.

My New Corporate Whistle-Blower Law

2011-01-31T17:48:00.000-08:00

Originally, I had intended this to just apply to employing illegal immigrants, but I found I like the idea so much that I want to apply it to every corporate crime. My idea is that if a company violates the law (such as by polluting, employing illegal immigrants, OSHA violations, et cetera) then the company is fined, on a yearly basis, an amount equal to 100% of the salary of the person or persons responsible for the violation as long as they stay on the payroll.

...AND...this is the important bit...they are also fined, on a yearly basis, an amount equal to 100% of the salary of any persons on the payroll who are accused of complicity by the person or persons responsible. (And once those people are accused, they count as "persons responsible", so if they in turn accuse someone, those people become responsible too.) Note the phrase, "accused", not "proven". The corporation is proven guilty in a court of law like normal, but their fine is determined solely by how many people point fingers.

The logic being that too often in corporate malfeasance, there's a sort of passive "things were done" atmosphere to the whole event. The blame is shared in such a way that everyone has just enough of their fingerprints on it that nobody can really say no, and nobody really does say no because nobody wants to be the one to step in front of the slow, ponderous juggernaut that is corporate decision-making and put their career on the line when everyone else is going along to get along. This way, the momentum is reversed: Everyone has a very good incentive to speak out to stop a corporate crime, because if you don't say anything and someone gets caught, the dominos can topple all the way up to the CEO and bankrupt the company (or get plenty of upper management fired.)

Is it fair? Probably not. There's a strong, deliberate incentive for witch-hunts and backstabbing. Disgruntled former employees can always choose to simply shaft their bosses just because they're mad about being fired. But you know what? That means that maybe those bosses have one hell of an incentive to keep a close eye on the corporate practices of their subordinates, instead of turning a blind eye to them because hey, profits are up and expenses are down. It would change the culture of large corporations, something badly needed in a climate where corporations have all the rights of people, but none of the responsibilities.

Review: Doctor Who - The Forgotten Army

2011-01-28T17:57:00.000-08:00

As wonderful as it's been to see the return of Doctor Who to our television screens, it's difficult to argue that TV's gain hasn't been print's loss. Whereas we used to get classic novels like 'Transit', 'Human Nature', and 'Set Piece' (to name just a few of the many, many classic novels released during the fifteen years that the series was off the air), now we get empty wastes of space like 'The Forgotten Army'. Although honestly, it's an insult to the other empty wastes of space that are the current book line to lump 'The Forgotten Army' in with them.

For one thing, it's pretty clear that Brian Minchin didn't have a chance to see an episode of the new season, and is working entirely from the writers' bible in his portrayal of the Eleventh Doctor and Amy. This is a bigger problem than it sounds like, because an actor's portrayal changes the way the character actually behaves, not just in the subtle ways (Karen Gillan's portrayal softens Amy's rough edges and makes her more charming and likeable) but in overt ways, as the writers see the way the actor plays the character and adjust the scripts accordingly. So an Amy Pond that's written just from the initial concept of the character comes across as startlingly unlikeable, while an Eleventh Doctor written just from a quick glimpse of the writers' bible comes across as a spastic idiot obsessed with bow ties. (Yes, yes, I hear you in the back. Shush. Matt Smith is sodding brilliant.)

But even if you account for that, this still is a pretty terrible book, because it never feels like Minchin is trying. The idea of little teeny aliens invading Earth by hiding in a woolly mammoth (that they think is perfect camouflage) should be the start of a hilarious romp, but Minchin never gives the aliens any personality and the whole thing winds up feeling terribly generic. It's as if he feels like he's "just" writing for kids, so why should he bother working hard? (And the actual children in the novel feel as though they're shoehorned in so that the kids reading can say, "Ooh, kids like us!")

When I described this novel to my wife, she said, "But it's still not as bad as 'The Pit', right?" I replied that I wasn't so sure. 'The Pit' might have been bloody awful, but I felt like Neil Penswick went out and wrote the best novel he was capable of. On reading 'The Forgotten Army', I felt like Brian Minchin went out and wrote the worst novel he thought he could get away with.

Pet Peeve of the Day, Shockingly Mundane Edition

2011-01-24T17:15:00.000-08:00

(Rooney)

You know what I hate? It's when you go to a store, and instead of giving you the best possible price, they give you a slightly less good price and offer to make up the difference if you join their "free customer loyalty program". Call me crazy, but I don't think that I should have to jump through extra hoops and essentially sell you my demographic information in order to get the same price I can get just by going to your competitor that doesn't have a "loyalty program". Perhaps there's a certain irony at work there--I'm more loyal to stores that don't demand my loyalty.

(/Rooney)