My Tiny Contribution to the 'Under the Dome' TV Series

I don't know about anyone else, but I'm really looking forward to the 'Under the Dome' series. I thought it was a great book, and my one complaint about it was that clearly at some point Stephen King thought to himself, "I could literally be stuck writing this book for the rest of my life if I don't find some way to wrap everything up," and so he takes out all the plotlines in one big boom. Which is a good way of doing it, if you have to end your story, but I think it could go for a long time on television just watching everything unfold. The talent behind it sounds good, the cast so far looks good...there's just one thing they need. A theme song.

So...

BARBIE: Julia, listen to me. The outside world, it's a mess. Life under the dome is better than anything they got up there!

The meth labs are always greener
With someone to buy that crank
You dream about going out there
But that is a big mistake
Just look at the world around you
Right here stuck inside this dome
Such wonderful things surround you
This place is your only home!

Under the dome
Under the dome
All the pollution
Needs no solution
Why would you roam?
Out in the world they tried and tried
But they can't find a way inside
Our hope is wanin'
Hoardin' propanin'
Under the dome

In here all the gals are happy
Except Big Jim's son's girlfriends
Those gals, they ain't quite so happy
They met some unpleasant ends
But Junior still loves to see them
At night when it's gettin' late
And after eleven P.M.
The corpses will be his date

Under the dome
Under the dome
Nobody save us
Big Jim enslave us
Just watch, you'll see
He and his cronies run this town
Under the dome we stick around
We got no choice now
We got no voice now
Under the dome
Under the dome
Since we can't leave here
We got to be here
Naturally
Even the kiddies know the score
Prophetic dreams will tell them more
Aliens did it
Leaving? Forget it!
Under the dome

The cop's for the chop
The plane's split in twain
The air's barely there
We're goin' insane
There's dread in our head
The priest was a beast
But Jim's at the brim of Hell
(Yeah)
The stiffs die in shifts
Till death's out of breath
The gas took a pass
To make crystal meth
Sanders and the chef
The only ones lef'
While Barbie's in his cell

Under the dome
Under the dome
Trapped like sardines
Send in the marines
This crisis hits home!
All of those soldiers right outside
Will we get help from them? DENIED!
Soldiers get framed here
Barbie gets blamed here
Under the dome
We gonna croak here
Choke on the smoke here
Under the dome
Dreams all forebode here
Meth labs explode here
It's getting hotter
There's no fresh water
We gonna die here
Kiss butts g'bye here
Under the dome

Looking for a Good Game Review Site

I've been kind of glancing over a few games lately. In no particular order, Legendary, King of Tokyo, the Star Wars LCG, Miskatonic School for Girls, DC Comics Deck-Building Game, Red November, and Zombie Dice are all drawing my eye as I wander through games stores. (To say nothing of Zombicide, which is no doubt going to be my first purchase after I win the lottery.)

That said, the cheapest of those is about twenty bucks, and in the current economy, it's not easy to just drop $40 on a game without being sure that it's something I'm actually going to enjoy playing. What's needed is a games review site. The problem is, there's not really something that works as an actual games review site--all my google searches redirect me to BoardGameGeek, which is an interesting Metafilter-esque site, but which has the huge problem that unlike the actual Metafilter, it's not aggregating professional reviews; it's aggregating individual reviews. And unlike RottenTomatoes, which does that for movies quite well, games are very much a niche market with very different tastes, and all the games seem to be rated in the 6-7 range because the people who like it love it, and the people who hate it absolutely loathe it.

So I'm looking for a few individual reviewers who I can use to gauge individual games prior to their purchase. First, are there any game review blogs/websites out there that you'd recommend? (I'd also be looking for ones worth reading for their own sakes, as well as ones I'd use to help make decisions. Funny games blogs are funny.) And second, as previously noted, gamers have very different tastes. I'd be generally looking for multiplayer games (5-6 players, although games robust enough to handle 8-10 players are awesome!), generally with short playtimes (30-45 minutes a round), and I prefer humor (of all types) to serious games. And I'd be looking for a reviewer whose tastes reflected mine. (So, for example, if someone gave 'Diplomacy' and 'Axis and Allies' great reviews, but disdained 'Grave Robbers From Outer Space', they're probably not going to recommend games I like, even if they understand very well what makes a good game.)

With all that in mind, any recommendations? Or do I need to start a site like this myself? (If I do, feel free to send me reviewers' copies, game designers!)

Crazy Cat-Man Update!

At this point, I must announce that we have added an additional two cats to the household. Here is Cat #1: 

His name is Moon, he has a brother named Star, and together they probably weigh about 32-35 pounds. To put this in perspective, my daughter weighed about 40 pounds when she was four. They are going on a program of diet and exercise to get them down to a leaner body shape (although they'll still probably weigh about 24 pounds combined.) I, meanwhile, am maintaining that you do not become a crazy cat person until the number of cats in the household is larger than the number of people. We still just barely qualify.

I Can't Watch Anything Without Developing a Crazy Fan Theory

As previously noted on this blog, I'm watching my way through 'Babylon 5', and last night I got to 'Interludes and Examinations'. For those of you who don't want to know what happens in a twenty-year-old TV series, you should probably navigate to a different page, because the spoilers are going to hit hard and fast here, but for those of you who either do want to know or have already seen the series and just don't remember specific episode titles that well, this is the episode that features the death of Kosh.

Or does it?

Because let's face it, the whole episode hinges on the idea that Kosh finally breaks the millennia-old pattern of being a lying, scheming, untrustworthy manipulative bastard who somehow still thinks of himself as holding the moral high ground, and does the right thing for once in his life even though it kills him...and then is promptly replaced a few episodes later by a Vorlon who's a lying, scheming, untrustworthy manipulative bastard who somehow thinks of himself as holding the moral high ground. And he's totally not the same Vorlon, and we know this because he wears a different outfit. And because, well, Kosh just wouldn't play emotionally manipulative games like that with Sheridan's head, not this time. That's why he appeared to Sheridan as his father and forced Sheridan to see a vision of his beloved parent dying before his eyes, to show how he was done being emotionally manipulative!

My theory is this. When Sheridan confronted Kosh in the hallway, Kosh rapidly realized that this was one time when his usual "cryptic jackass" schtick wasn't going to work. Sheridan wasn't about to back down, and no longer respected Kosh's moral authority to conduct the war in his own fashion. The thought of actually respecting Sheridan's autonomy and treating him as an equal partner clearly never even occurred to Kosh; if it did, he'd have said to Sheridan, "If the Vorlons enter the war, the Shadows will kill me in reprisal," instead of saying, "If you do this, there will be a price. I will not be with you when you go to Z'ha'dum." The former allows Sheridan to make an informed, rational decision over the value of risking the life of a friend and ally in order to make a decisive strike against the Shadow forces (as well as allowing him to prepare for the counter-strike when it does occur, and possibly saving Kosh's life)...the latter is a thinly-veiled threat, the kind a parent makes against a petulant child. (While simultaneously being the act of a petulant child: "Well, fine! If you're going to tell me what to do, maybe I'll just die, huh? I bet you'd be really sorry if I died and you had to fight the Shadows all by yourself!")

At this point, Kosh goes off, rallies the Vorlons, and they have their decisive battle...and then he walks right back to his quarters at Babylon 5. This is an action that really only makes sense if he's either a) going to fake his own death, or b) if the "petulant child" theory is correct, and he's really so into his Vorlon Pity Party that he's going to let the Shadows kill him just to make a point to Sheridan that acting like you know better than a Vorlon has serious negative consequences. (In fairness, JMS says that he goes to his death willingly because he doesn't want to risk anyone else dying to defend him, but that's really a slightly nicer way of saying, "Vorlon Pity Party" all over again. "No, I don't trust you to make a rational, informed decision that might cost someone their life. I'll just sit here and die so that you don't get hurt. Don't feel bad for me or anything. It's not your fault that I died saving your species, just because you wouldn't listen to me when I told you I knew best.")

Which is pretty much what Kosh says, at the end. And just to really twist the emotional knife in good and hard, he says it wearing Sheridan's father's face. Sheridan is forced to watch his father die, which is emotional sadism of the highest order even if he does know it's Kosh behind it. Given that, and given Kosh's history of manipulating people towards what he sees as benevolent ends without any real regard for them as people--let's face it, Kosh only acts even remotely nice in order to reward people for doing what he wants them to--I don't see any reason why we can't assume he escapes the Shadows (he's already duked it out with them once and only received minor damage to his encounter suit) and then comes back as Ulkesh in order to punish Sheridan for disobeying. (Yes, I'm aware that this will require a little work to make fit into the events of "Falling Towards Apotheosis". More on this later.)

I think that the only reason people ever believed Kosh would die for someone else like that is because he slots into the Wise Mentor role for Sheridan in the Campbellian ur-myth, and Wise Mentors always die mid-way through the story so that the hero can find his own way in the world. But if you instead assume that the younger races are not so much being taught by the Vorlons as relentlessly patronized and used as catspaws in an ancient, petty feud, it becomes pretty clear that there's no way Kosh is going to sacrifice himself for anyone. It's completely out of character for him. Whereas lying, shamelessly using guilt as a tool to make people do what he wants, and using his chameleonic abilities to appear to someone in a form that they will listen to, well...that fits right in.

Quiz: Babylon 5 Episode Title Or Prog-Rock Song Title?

Five of the titles below are Babylon 5 episode titles. Five are prog-rock songs. Without resorting to Google, which is which?

1. "Dharma for One"

2. "Midnight on the Firing Line"

3. "The Geometry of Shadows"

4. "In the Court of the Crimson King"

5. "On the Silent Wings of Freedom"

6. "Requiem for Methuselah"

7. "The Enemy God Dances With the Black Spirits"

8. "Passing Through Gethsemane"

9. "Intersections In Real Time"

10. "Stormbringer"

(The astute among you will notice at least one trick question.)

"What Do You Want, Doctor?"

I absolutely cannot get this scene out of my head, so...

Anyone walking through the Zocalo would have noticed nothing more than two nice young men. They might even have spared a passing thought to just how nice they seemed; both of them were well-kept and smartly-dressed, a far cry from the usual riff-raff and shady sorts that were attracted to Babylon 5. Admittedly, the bow tie made one of them look a little old-fashioned, but there was nothing wrong with that. Two nice young men, smiling pleasantly and having a friendly chat. Nothing to draw much attention. Nothing worth talking about. Nothing worth a second glance. That's what anyone walking through the Zocalo would have thought...because they weren't looking at either man's eyes.

"So tell me, Doctor," Morden said, "what brings you to Babylon 5? What do you want?"

The Doctor smiled. It didn't make him look younger; far from it. The smile was the weary, cynical grin of a thousand years, entirely out of place on such a young face. "'What do you want?' That's a dangerous question. Possibly the most dangerous question in existence. Well, apart from 'What does this button do?' and 'Do you think I should cut the red wire first?' Both of which tend to get some remarkably shirty and unhelpful reactions--"

"How can it be dangerous, Doctor?" Morden smiled disarmingly. It didn't make him look younger, either. Morden smiled the same way that burglars jimmied open windows. "It's just a simple question. I'm trying to help you. And I can't help you unless you tell me what you want."

"But that's exactly why it's dangerous. When I answer that question, I give you information about what it is that I value. If I answer, 'Jammie Dodgers'--" the Doctor held up a hand quickly-- "just as a hypothetical example, mind you, I have some in my pocket already, they're a bit fluffy but still perfectly good--but if I do answer 'Jammie Dodgers', then you have a hold on me. If I have something you want, or something you need, you can get it from me by promising me Jammie Dodgers." The Doctor's tone was light, his voice rattling through the words as though they were in a hurry to leave, but his eyes were as cold and dark as galaxies.

"And since you know what I value, but I don't know what you want, you can make it seem as though your offer is highly prized...and mine almost worthless. Why wouldn't I trade whatever little trifle you ask for in return for my heart's desire? And before you know it, you're asking for a little more each time and giving away a little less, and I don't even realize the value of what I've lost and what you've gained, and I don't notice how much power you have over me until I've given away an entire universe...for a single stale biscuit." The Doctor leaned forward in his seat. His smile had vanished entirely. "A person who knows exactly what people want is the second most dangerous man in the universe, Mister Morden."

Morden stared back, his own smile still present but looking decidedly strained. "It sounds like you've already made up your mind, then," he said. "That's a shame, Doctor. I think my associates would have been very interested in you."

The Doctor looked to Morden's immediate left. Then his immediate right. "Oh, I suspect they will be anyway. People like them usually are. Assuming you have a very broad definition of the word 'people', which I generally do. I'm sure I'll be seeing you again, Mister Morden. Just like I'm sure you'll be seeing me." He rose to leave.

Morden let him get almost out of earshot before his curiosity got the better of him. "Doctor?" he called out.

The Doctor turned, looking as though he wasn't obeying quite the same laws of physics as everyone else did when he did so. "Yes?"

"You said the second." Morden's voice was very steady when he asked. It was the sound of someone trying very hard not to sound nervous. "What would the most dangerous man be?"

The Doctor smiled sadly, the sort of smile given by a teacher when a prize pupil made an expected mistake. "I should have thought that was obvious," he said softly. "The most dangerous man in the universe is a man who doesn't want anything you can provide." He turned away again, and his casual, "Goodbye, Mister Morden," was lost in the crowd.

Morden looked to his left. Then to his right. If he spoke, it was nothing anyone in the Zocalo heard.

My Family, It Brings the Crazy

Tonight my daughter, who is now seven and in first grade, went to the school carnival with her biological dad. He bought her cotton candy, which he jokingly told her was a new pet named 'Fluffy'.

"And now I'm devouring his flesh," she said.

I don't think I really need to add anything to that, other than to say, that's my little girl.

Why It Sucks Sometimes Being a Doctor Who Fan

BBC: I'm sorry, I'm afraid that we're going to have to postpone the start of your season again. Budget concerns, you know. You'll just have do make do with the back half of Season Seven and a couple of specials for your 50th anniversary.

Doctor Who Producer: But our series is a phenomenal success! It's getting astounding ratings and great audience appreciation numbers every year, year in and year out!

BBC: Well, yes, but you see it's a question of money. Doctor Who is quite expensive to make, you see, and we've got a limited budget.

Doctor Who: But when you factor in overseas sales, merchandising, spin-offs, tie-ins, and the DVD market, the show is actually the most profitable thing the BBC makes!

BBC: AHEM. We do not sully our hands with mere commerce. We are the BBC, proud guardians of the glorious cultural heritage of Great Britain! It doesn't matter how much grubby, filthy lucre your series makes--we don't even keep track of such things!* What's important is the artistic merit of what you create, dear boy.

Doctor Who: Well, our AI numbers haven't dipped below the mid-80s since the series started. By the BBC's own standards, we're making a series that everyone who watches considers to be some of the finest material on television.

BBC: Yes, and that's wonderful. But you see, it's very expensive...

(wash, rinse, repeat...)

*Not literally true, but more or less accurate; money that 'Doctor Who' merchandising doesn't go back to making more 'Doctor Who', it goes back to the BBC's general Dramatic Series pool. They might keep track of it, but it doesn't count in the series' favor, because the BBC is not supposed to be concerned with turning a profit.

City of Heroes Update: Next Year in Jerusalem!

If you're reading this, you might very well share my interest in 'City of Heroes', and my frustration with the shutdown of the game last November. (If you're not reading this, then you have no taste in literature and you probably hunt puppies for sport. So nyeah.) I've been following the efforts of various fans to restore the game in some form or other, and thought that those of you not in the loop might appreciate an update on the matter. Because, of course, I totally have a bigger audience than the Titan forums and it entirely consists of people who don't know how to use Google.

There are three basic plans being advanced at this point. The first, which is probably the most desired outcome, is a plan to purchase the property from NCSoft, rehire the most essential Paragon Studios staff, and restart the game. This is probably the plan with the lowest chance of success, as everyone involved is aware, but it's not hopeless by any means. Acclaimed fantasy author Mercedes Lackey, who was a long-time member of the community almost since its inception (she even wrote a short story set in the CoH universe) is using her contacts in the science-fiction and fantasy industry (and within the former Paragon Studios) to craft business proposals that actually stand a chance of being listened to. The current target is Google Play, who have already expressed some tentative interest in the idea. We should know more on this in a month or so.

The second plan, which is probably the most likely to see results first, is a plan to "reverse engineer" the servers using the data from eight years' of gameplay and the client saved to the hard drive of each player. The idea behind this is that while NCSoft owns the intellectual property, and they own the code on the servers, each player owns the software that they bought and paid for and still have on their hard drive. So if you can make a server that uses none of NCSoft's code or IP, and people interact with it using a legally-purchased copy of 'City of Heroes', then you can make a CoH clone and NCSoft can't do squat about it. (Of course, some people have pointed out that frivolous C&D letters are a common tool of big companies, but it's at least worth trying to follow the copyright laws in a situation like this.) The coders involved have already made big progress; you can apparently log into their server and move around the first city zone, albeit as a translucent ghost-person who skids around through the air like you're sliding on invisible ice. But for three months of work, that's hellishly impressive progress.

The third plan, which is in some ways the most interesting, is what started as "Plan Z". It's an attempt to create an entirely new game from scratch, one that retains no aspects of CoH's code, mechanics or IP, but retains a similar "feel" in its gameplay and theme. There are currently two projects going on under this banner, "Project: Phoenix" and "Heroes and Villains", and while both of them are still in very early development and unlikely to be playable even in an alpha state anytime soon, they are both moving and could result in an embarrassment of riches if they turn out to be as good as the game that inspired them. In short, while this is a frustrating time to be a fan of the best superhero MMO ever, the future does have a little bit of light at the end of the tunnel!

Evolutionary Biology for Jackasses

The other day, I was reading an article on the Gawker network about American culture and obesity. The article didn't really stick in my head (which is why I didn't link to it) but one of the comments did. It was someone insisting that all of the medical information indicating that there is a heritable component to obesity, and that it's easier for some people to lose weight than others, is all being completely overstated and overblown by fat people who don't want to admit that they're too lazy to lose weight. His argument was that there couldn't be a genetic element to obesity, because there's no way evolution would select for a trait that made you overweight, because you'd have a hard time escaping predators.

Now, I know that you, my regular audience, is far too intelligent to fall for that line. But on the off-chance that someone is wandering into my blog for the first time and actually believes this, I will explain it to you in simple terms.

For approximately 99.999995% of the 3.5 billion years life has existed on this planet, for approximately 99.999995% of the living beings on this planet, food has been scarce. Starvation has been a real and omnipresent risk for every single living thing for longer than human beings can actually comprehend, and even today, a relatively tiny percentage of a relatively tiny number of species can actually avoid this food scarcity. As a result, life on Earth has spent 3.5 billion years adapting to become the most efficient energy storage machines it is possible to be. Your mind may know that there is food in the store on the corner, but your body is the inheritor of a vast and complex legacy that knows, on a genetic level, that the next meal may not come for days.

Human beings have not adapted to deal well with a super-abundance of food for the same reason that we have not adapted to deal well with leprechaun attacks, or rampaging unicorns. It's just fundamentally something we have never encountered in any meaningful sense. To suggest that somehow primitive Twinkies tempted our proto-hominid ancestors, and that evolution favored the lean and the mean over the mastodon-hide couch potatoes until the modern generation started going to hell in a handbasket, is to be fundamentally ignorant of the basic facts of biology. You know how you can tell this? Because actual evolutionary biologists are telling you.

So let's face that basic fact. Losing weight is something that basic biology makes it hard for many people to do. If you are one of the people for whom it is easy, congratulations. I'm very happy for you. But please don't imagine that this is somehow due to your superior moral fiber, OK? Thanks.

Relationship Advice for Max and Katie of Amazing Race 22

For those of you who don't watch 'The Amazing Race', one of the teams is actually a pair of newlyweds named Max and Katie. The Race is serving as their honeymoon as well as a chance at a million bucks, which would be kind of sweet except for the fact that they're this season's token "I'm Not Here To Make Friends" team. (For those of you who don't watch 'The Amazing Race', this is a phrase that at least one team breaks out in their introductory video every season. It is code for, "The guy on this team is a hyper-competitive douchebag with anger management issues, who will take it out on his partner. The woman is passive-aggressive and prone to emotional collapse at the slightest difficulty. Both of them will take every opportunity to snipe at other teams, claiming it's because the other teams are their opponents when in fact you begin to suspect pretty quickly that they're like this to everybody.")

Obviously, I am no expert on the Race. I've never run, and it would be foolish to give them racing advice...especially because the episodes don't air live and the outcome is predetermined, even if not known. But I have been in a successful relationship for a long time, so I figure that even if I can't give racing tips, I can give marriage tips.

1. The phrase "You're the albatross around our neck here", while entertaining, does not foster a sense of partnership and trust that is so necessary to a good relationship. Alternatives might include, "Good job, honey, I think you'll get it next time," or "Try a little bit of acceleration into the turn next time." Alternatives probably should not include, "You're killing us," or "Who'd have thought it, I'm better at this than you are."

2. Long drives in unfamiliar territory can be stressful on any couple. Try to avoid blaming each other for wrong turns. Try especially hard to avoid blaming the driver when he asks you point-blank, "Do you want me to turn around?" and you respond with, "No, I just have a feeling that we're going the wrong way."

3. An important part of any relationship is knowing your partner's strengths and weaknesses. It is not, however, wise to announce your partner's weaknesses directly to the camera on national television. (Especially when it's not exactly like you're strong in that area yourself, Max. I don't know that either one of you is going to be winning any likability contests, frankly.)

Those are just a few tips--I look forward to giving more as the Race goes on!

...well, strictly speaking I look forward to giving one more and then watching these two bickering twits get Philiminated, but if not I'm sure they'll at least provide me with a few more cheap jokes.

"Do No Harm"

I don't normally dabble in fanfic these days--if I write fiction, I'm going to try to sell it, and I've always considered fanfic to be a labor of love by definition--but I certainly have done so, and since it's already Thursday and I haven't written my Monday entry, I figured I'd show one of my efforts that never showed up anywhere else. Jump behind the cut for a Ten/Martha story called, unimaginatively enough, "Do No Harm"!

When I Stopped Caring About the Oscars

I was a little stuck for a post idea today, because I'm assuming you aren't interested in "Why Boxers Are the Cutest Dogs in the World, Oh Yes You Are, Oh Yes You Are!!!" (We've been spending our last several Saturdays looking at rescue puppies.) I thought about doing my Oscar picks...but then I looked at the list, and realized that a) I had absolutely no idea which way those withered old prunes at the Academy would vote, since it seemed to have no correlation at all with the actual quality of the films, and b) I had absolutely no ability to care, since I had no respect for the decision-making ability of the Academy and no longer view an Oscar as any kind of sign of a film's quality or lack thereof.

So instead I'm going to talk about when that started and why.

Let's take a quick trip back to 1996. I'm in college, I'm a lit major, and Kenneth Branagh's 'Hamlet' is in limited release. The film pretty much only did a limited release; it was so damn crazy prestigious and ambitious they couldn't get most theaters to show it. A four-hour long unabridged, uncut adaptation of 'Hamlet'? Every scene, every line of a Shakespeare play? Yeah, that's not going to Mall of America 14. The only theater in the Twin Cities to even show it was the Uptown, an independent arthouse theater that showed prestige films and foreign movies. I didn't care about any of that; I just knew I had to see this movie. It was 'Hamlet', my favorite Shakespeare play, as performed by Ken Branagh, who'd done previous adaptations I liked a lot. (I forgive him his casting of Keanu. It probably seemed like a good idea at the time.)

So off I went, one cold January day in 1997, to see 'Hamlet' when it finally got around to Minnesota. And I was stunned. The film was lush, it was vivid, and it was spectacularly dynamic--there are scenes in the play that I still feel like I never truly understood until I watched the Branagh version. (His treatment of the "get thee to a nunnery" confrontation with Ophelia, for example, is absolutely astounding and explains Hamlet's abhorrent treatment of her in terms that the audience can understand--he thinks that she's in on Claudius' full conspiracy, not recognizing that she's being used. Which is entirely in keeping of his murder of Polonius and his actions throughout the play.) This was, in short, a magnificent experience.

About halfway through, the heating broke.

Let's repeat this: The heating broke, in January, in Minnesota, during a four-hour movie. And I sat through it anyway. And the next day, I went back out and saw it again. The heating still wasn't working. I didn't care. That is how good Ken Branagh's 'Hamlet' is--I will watch it in sub-freezing temperatures.

The Academy nominated it for four awards. It was not nominated for its direction, for any acting awards (despite having a cast that included Derek Jacobi, Julie Christie, Kate Winslet and Richard Briers as well as Branagh himself) or for Best Picture. All it got were two technical nominations (Art Direction and Costume Design), Original Score and Screenplay. It lost three of those to 'The English Patient', and the fourth to 'Sling Blade'. Let's repeat that--what is arguably the greatest work of literature in the history of the English language, in the eyes of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences,  somewhere in the same neighborhood but not nearly as good as "Forrest Gump Meets Psycho". (Actually, more like "Psycho II".)

After that, I just couldn't respect their decision-making abilities any further. I watched the awards a few more times (most notably a psychologically-scarring night out in 2002 at a cinema grill in Raleigh that "livened up" the commercial breaks with their amateur variety show. Emphasis on "amateur".) But ultimately, the show isn't entertaining when you don't care who wins, and I don't.

There are other "WTF?" moments in the history of the Oscars, like their inexcusable failure to nominate 'WALL-E' for Best Picture or their snub of 'Pulp Fiction' in favor of the overhyped 'Forrest Gump'. But 'Hamlet' is always going to be the one that sticks with me. So yeah, it'll probably be 'Lincoln' or 'Argo' or something that wins 'Best Picture', or possibly 'Django Unchained' simply because someone will have decided that Tarantino deserves a "make-up" Oscar for the one he should have gotten. But it won't matter to me.

Must Resist...Urge to Troll!

I've been reading "Manboobz" again. I really shouldn't, because it's depressing as all get-out to realize that there are real, genuine human beings out there so damaged and broken that they blame their mental image of women for all their problems (and frequently seem to be about one step away from snapping and committing a horrific act of violence) but the site also provides a valuable dose of perspective on these people by pointing out that no, they are not moral crusaders or oppressed masculinists or anything other than pathetic, lonely men who haven't figured out yet that the reason they can't get laid is because women don't like guys who hate women. (Funny that.)

And then there are the pickup artists. I admit, those are my favorite posts on the site, because I'm slowly developing a theory that the entire "pickup artist community" out there is basically composed of all those guys in high school who bragged about how they got laid every single night, explaining to virgins how it was done because virgins were the only people who wouldn't spot their total lack of knowledge about what an actual naked woman looked like, only it's ten years later and they're still doing it. Seriously. It would not surprise me if there was not a single one of these guys who had ever even spoken to a real life flesh-and-blood woman in a social context, and their entire "game" consisted of them repeating tips they'd heard from some other pickup artist and boasting about how well they worked for him so that people didn't start accusing him of being a virgin. (Or gay. Unsurprisingly, these guys are homophobes as well as misogynists.)

And so I am fighting the urge to troll. Because it occurs to me that if you're dealing with an entire group of people who a) have no knowledge of what they speak, and b) cannot, even for a second, admit said lack of knowledge lest they be exposed as frauds, it might be kind of interesting to pretend to be a pickup artist and see just how big a lie you can get away with spreading. You know, start going into their forums and insisting that the hardest part of picking up a woman is making sure that afterwards she doesn't inject you with her paralyzing venom, allowing her to implant her eggs in your stomach. Or stating that the external breasts are nice, but it's not until the woman gets aroused enough for her second set of breasts to unfold from her hidden hip pouches that you know you've got her turned on. Nobody would call you on it, because they'd all be afraid if they said you were a liar, a chorus of voices would suddenly say, "Oh, you didn't know about the hidden breast pouches? Geez, no wonder you have a hard time getting a second date."

The flaw of this, of course, is the same reason why I'm having an easy time fighting the urge. I'd have to spend time around pickup artists in order to make the whole thing work. And, well...these are the sort of people I avoided in high school, and y'know what? They haven't gotten any better with age.

In Defense of 'Moonraker'

'Moonraker' has somehow, over the years, become reviled as an example of everything that went wrong with the Roger Moore era of James Bond (which has, in turn, become reviled as everything that's wrong with the Bond franchise, but in this case that's more or less correct so I won't call that out.) It's supposedly an example of relentless camp and bad comedy, nothing but a blatant attempt to cash in on the 'Star Wars' fad by putting James Bond in space. Even 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' commented on it in Season Six, when the Trio use it as an example of why Roger Moore sucked in their running argument as to which Bond was best. (Which is something of an irony when people use the claims raised in that argument, as it's intentionally placed there as an example of people who get into silly and pointless arguments where there's no real "right" and "wrong".)

In fact, it feels like most of the people complaining about 'Moonraker' really just saw that scene in 'Buffy', because the camp that most people complain about is actually pretty seriously toned down compared to 'Octopussy' (probably the campiest of the Moore movies.) Really, the movie hangs together pretty well; Bond is saved only once by an improbable gadget (the gondola that the Trio complain about) ...which is about on a par with 'The Spy Who Loved Me', universally held up as an example of the best of Roger Moore's Bond work.

And while 'Spy' is good, 'Moonraker' is a step above it simply because this is just about the only Bond movie where the female love interest is demonstrated to be intelligent, capable, and isn't also the peril monkey. It's not perfect--we get Corinne Dufour, who's victimized in a pretty misogynist scene--but Holly Goodhead, the scientist/CIA agent, is smart and every bit as competent as Bond and plays a key role at the end instead of just sitting there and going, "OK, James, it's time for the man to step up and be heroic!" And she's played by a smart actress, which isn't true in 'Spy'. Barbara Bach is wooden, vapid, and utterly cannot do her part justice, and is the weak link in that film.

And 'Moonraker' has some great action sequences--the opening skydiving fight is spectacular, the swordfight is great, and while it does require some suspension of disbelief to imagine that there are space Marines in the Bond universe, the battle itself is staged incredibly well. Jaws is well used from his opening appearance through to his hiring as Drax's replacement heavy ("Oh! Well, if he's available...") to the end. I've always liked Jaws; he feels like he's a character from another series of films about a morally-ambiguous indestructible cyborg mercenary that just didn't get made in our reality, and he's used well here.

And Hugo Drax is awesome. I repeat--Hugo Drax is awesome. He is the best Bond villain in the whole Moore era, a visionary idealist who's clearly unimpressed with Bond's suavity and charm, and handles the whole bother with dry wit and skilled managerial delegation. I love his every scene and every line, and he's actually better than Goldfinger, which is not easy.

Of course, there are quite a few other Moore Bond films, but I immediately disqualify 'Octopussy', 'Live and Let Die' and 'The Man With the Golden Gun' on the grounds of cringeworthy racism, 'A View to a Kill' suffers from the fact that Moore is clearly too old to be playing the part by that point, and 'For Your Eyes Only' criminally misuses Julian Glover, one of the best actors to ever be a Bond villain. Really, the only competition is 'The Spy Who Loved Me', and 'Moonraker' beats it handily.

So yes, if you can't accept laser guns alongside jetpacks, invisible cars, and...um...slow-moving lasers aimed at tables...in your Bond movies, I don't think I'll be able to convince you of how good 'Moonraker' is. But I know which of us is missing out.

Fun Games I've Played Lately: Red Dragon Inn

We've finally been getting back into tabletop gaming in our household after a long period of inactivity--for years, my friends and I played 'City of Heroes' when we wanted to do stuff together, because a) we all liked being superheroes and b) co-operative games felt more like our "thing" than competitive ones; then, when my wife moved in, there were always scheduling issues (I worked nights, then she worked weekends and nights, then our roommate worked nights...) But now everyone is working weekdays, and we have Saturday nights free to game. And 'City of Heroes' is temporarily unplayable. (I refuse to believe it is anything other than temporary.)

So we've been playing some of the games I've accumulated over the years. Including my most recent purchase, 'Red Dragon Inn', which is just fun. The basic premise is that you are one of a party of adventurers who has just returned from an epic dungeon crawl, replete with gold and high on life. As such, you do what adventurers everywhere do when they're full of cash and on an adrenalin high...you go to a tavern and you gamble, carouse and brawl until you pass out or get kicked out.

In this case, that's literal. Every character starts with a stash of cash, a Fortitude score of 20, and an Alcohol Content of 0. Every turn, you play cards that help you win (or cheat) at gambling, (probably) accidentally injure your friends, and keep you (marginally) sober in the face of a seemingly endless supply of drinks given to you by your friends/opponents. If you ever run out of gold, or if your Fortitude score ever equals your Alcohol Content, you are either kicked out or pass out. Winner is the last one standing.

The mechanism is clever; each player uses their own deck, custom-made to reflect that character's strengths and weaknesses. Gerki the Sneak has plenty of cash-grabbing cards, and unsurprisingly he's the best of all of them at gambling (and cheating.) Deirdre the Priestess has healing magic that keeps her Fortitude up, but isn't really that good at staying sober. Fiona the Volatile is tough and hearty, but loses money quickly; while Zot the Wizard is a well-balanced character with a little of everything (and a psychotic rabbit familiar named Pooky.) The sequels, which can be combined freely with the original game, add other characters to the mix.

But what's best about the game is the sense of fun involved in the design. The art is spectacular, giving each character a personality that seems to come right off the cards. The card names give you a vivid idea of what's going on in the game; countering a drink with Fiona's "This is just the thing to polish my armor!" or injuring someone with Deirdre's "Oops! Sometimes my healing spells just wear off!" evokes the sort of punishing camaraderie you see in a role-playing group. (Or, in the case of cards like, "Oh no! Pooky's on a drunken rampage again!", just how freaking weird roleplaying games can get sometimes.)

It's a perfect "end of the night" game, best played among people who aren't too competitive, and we'll definitely be picking up the sequels. If for no other reason than one of them actually lets you play as Pooky.

I Wish

I wish I could have met Michael O'Hare after having seen the first season of 'Babylon 5'. I wish I could have told him that he had a real gift for playing the straight man; some of his best moments in the series come when he's playing opposite Jerry Doyle's Garibaldi, pretending to be oh-so-dignified and above this kind of silly behavior, but with a tiny little secret smile that lets you know he's in on the joke.

I've said in the past that I felt really lucky to be able to tell creators like Don Rosa, Gene Colan, and Al Feldstein what they meant to me and how much I think of them as creators and as people. It's always sad to realize that no matter how many people you can share that with, there are always going to be some people that you never get the chance to talk to.

Remember that, when you're at the next convention and you see someone you admire passing by. There's not always going to be the chance to do it again.

If Series Set In the Modern Day Were Written Like Sci-Fi Series

1. The main characters' tastes in music would all tend towards 18th century classical music. Occasionally, characters would get into arguments over one person's preference for Mozart over Bach, which the other dismisses as "just noise".

2. Foolish characters or great wits would be referred to as "a regular Thomas Betterton/Elizabeth Barry"; a particularly wacky or comedic situation would be referred to as "like something Thomas Sheridan would have come up with."

3. At least one character would have an eccentric fondness for leyden jars or spinning jennys, building them in his spare time as a quirky character touch.

4. At least one character would have a desire to travel by paddleboat, horse, or railway carriage, feeling that cars and planes "lack romance".

5. Characters would frequently and casually analogize events in the present-day as being "somewhat akin to the Treaty of Westminster helping to cause the Seven Years War". Nobody would ever need the Treaty of Westminster explained to them. Nobody would ever confuse it with the Treaty of Westminster that ended the Third Anglo-Dutch War, either.

6. In a related issue, people would recognize the Prussian, Ottoman, and Austro-Hungarian flags on sight.

7. Everyone would exclusively quote Shakespeare. EXCLUSIVELY.

8. When not wearing their professional outfits, people would dress in slightly more utilitarian versions of waistcoats, ruffs, and powdered wigs. (The powdered wigs would be smaller, for example, to show the changing times and fashions.)

9. Sports fans would follow cricket, boxing or horse racing, and would occasionally express a longing to be able to travel back in time to the days when Lumpy Stevens beat John Small only for the ball to pass through the wicket without being disturbed. They would, on occasion, insist that the sport was better before they added the third stump to the wicket.

10. If anyone ever did reference a modern-day piece of pop culture, whether in the form of music, books, comedy, theatre, movies, or television, it would be only in reference to an actual celebrity in that particular field visiting them. The celebrity in question would never actually perform in their chosen field, but at least one character would always have been a fan.

Top 5 Things I'm Looking Forward To in the Worlds of Warcraft Movie

1. The preview screenings, which last fifteen minutes before the projector crashing. Everyone is asked to try watching from the beginning again to see if they can replicate the problem.

2. The first screening, which is filled with epic battles, fantastic special effects, and a whole bunch of jerks shouting spoilers for the ending in the lower-left corner of the screen.

3. The spectacular ending, in which the heroes take on the evil Naxxaramas...and all wipe within the first minute. Then, in voice-over, the leader of the group explains to everyone that there's going to be new footage next weekend, in which they gear up by running some dungeons and getting some potions, and tighten up their tactics for the next run.

4. The disastrous piracy problem due to Blizzard's trumpeting of the ease and smoothness of their bit-torrented download system.

5. The DVD, in which the heroes win only to find out that the level cap has gone up, their gear that they worked months to get is now obsolete, and they have to pay fifty bucks to fight the next villain.

Trying Not To Talk About Babylon 5, But...

Here's the thing. I am currently going through and mainlining Babylon 5 into my brain, for a secret writerly reason of which I cannot speak at this moment. (Because it is secret. And writerly.) I never watched the show when it was on, for a wide variety of reasons including the fact that I am very apathetic about popular culture as a whole: My general philosophy is that if it's still fondly remembered by the time I get around to watching it two decades after the fact, it's probably very good and well worth waiting for. If it drops completely off the radar and everyone scorns it for being a failure that started off promising and proceeded to head downhill like a rocket-powered toboggan, it's probably 'Heroes'. (But I kid the series!) Seriously, if it's not worth watching, I probably will find out about it in the decade or so before I get around to it. It's the Planetary philosophy: "We're archaeologists. We'll dig you up and work it all out in a couple of years."

(The best part of this philosophy is that by the time I get around to watching it, the DVDs are cheap and I don't have to wait through the offseasons.)

So the point is, I have a lot of thoughts about Babylon 5, many of which I am restraining myself from saying due to writerly secret reasons. But one thing I do keep thinking about, and am allowing myself to talk about even though I'm shutting up about a lot of it, is, "Why did the series never come back?" I have heard from my lovely and intelligent wife that JMS, creator/producer of the series, doesn't really have an interest in doing more on account of how hard it was to get the first series made, and how many of the actors have unfortunately passed on, and how he's more or less told the story he wanted to tell. And while those strike me as true (because I know my wife and in addition to being lovely and intelligent, she knows metric tons about 'Babylon 5'), they also strike me as good things to tell yourself, if you're a former producer of a science-fiction series with a small-but-devoted fanbase that can't get renewed. It does seem to me that there has to be at least an element of falsehood there...because 'Crusade'. Clearly, JMS at one point felt like there were enough ideas floating around in the B5 universe to sustain a second five-year series. That series was canceled with four years of stories left untold. That suggests to me that there are more stories he at least was willing to try to tell.

The question is, "Why can't he?" Because let's face it, we live in a very different era than we did in 1999 (when the series was canceled.) Shows with cult followings and long tails now routinely make returns, from 'Family Guy' to 'Doctor Who' to 'Futurama' to 'Serenity' (which itself is probably due for another return a few years from now. Big Red Button, guys!) We live in an archival culture now, where quality television is not dependent on the vagaries of an inconsistent syndication schedule to gain a following among science-fiction fans. So why is it that Babylon 5 nostalgia isn't leading us back towards a revival of the series and an explanation of the Drakh war? At the very least, Dark Horse should be putting out a comic book of this stuff.

I think the answer is that the very thing that Babylon 5 fans loved has given the series a reputation that prevents it from gaining that kind of return following. Everyone talked, during the period the series was on the air, about its intricate continuity and long-running storyarcs. About hints that began in the pilot and slowly unfolded over the course of five whole seasons. (I used to have a button that said on it, "Doctor Who explained, Babylon 5 predicted, Star Trek...apologized for." It's funny if you're an obsessive Doctor Who geek.) The problem with this is that it intimidates people away from the show. Even in an archival era, where the series is ten bucks a season and you can get through the whole thing in a couple of months if you work at it, Babylon 5 is legendary for requiring an investment to get through. (And it's also got an entirely undeserved reputation as having a long slog of dull episodes to get through before you hit the "good stuff", by which fans tend to mean the metastory-heavy shows. Personally, I think that Season One's standalone episodes are plenty good...but I'd never have known that if I'd listened to the people telling me to watch the show.)

The long and short of it is, we are now in an era where practically every series takes its model from B5, and sci-fi fans should not be scared away from a series with storyarcs. But because it was so innovative at the time, and because so many people talk about nothing but the arc plots, I think people somehow assume they're going to be harder to follow or require more attentive viewing than any other series, and they don't know if they want to put in the effort. Which prevents the show from developing the kind of following that sells DVDs, comics, merchandising, and other stuff that would make the bean-counters in Hollywood stand up, take notice, and shove a dump truck full of money in Straczynski's face and say, "Is this enough to make the kind of show you want?" Which is probably what it would take to overcome his reluctance to dive back into it all.

Basically, what I think I'm saying is, "If you've been waiting 20 years to watch 'Babylon 5' because you were worried about having to mainline the whole thing into your brain over the course of a month or so, you don't need to be. I'm not doing that because it's the only way to watch the show. I'm doing it for secret reasons. Shhhhhh."

Why I Can't Believe Manti Te'o

For those of you who don't follow college football (and given the Venn diagram of my blog and college football fans, I suspect that's a whole lot of you) allow me to first explain who Manti Te'o is before I explain why I can't believe him. Te'o is a linebacker for Notre Dame (or was--he's going out for the NFL draft this spring) who had a pretty serious string of really excellent games this year, and was in line for the Heisman trophy. In his interviews and press appearances, he talked a lot about how hard it was to keep playing after the personal tragedies he'd experienced, but how hard he tried to be inspired by them. See, Te'o's girlfriend and his grandmother had both died that year.

The grandmother hadn't come as much of a shock--she was elderly and in poor health--but his girlfriend, now that was a real sob story. She'd gotten into a car crash, and when she came out of her coma in the hospital, it was to the news that she had cancer. She fought valiantly against the disease, but in the end, it claimed her not long before...or possibly after, accounts vary...Te'o's grandma died.

Actually, accounts vary on a lot of things involving Te'o's girlfriend. Primarily because, as the sports news site Deadspin revealed, she never existed. Everything about her was made up out of whole cloth. The pictures were of a different girl, one who was an acquaintance of a man named Ronaiah Tuiasosopo, who may or may not have known Te'o. The Twitter account was a fake, the school she supposedly went to had no records of a student with her name, the hospital she was supposedly staying at had no records of her, and there was no birth or death certificate for her.

Te'o and his agent (since he's gone out for the draft, he now has an agent) were quick to turn this into a brand new inspirational story--Te'o was the victim of a crushing, malicious hoax that nearly ripped his heart out, but nonetheless he plans to keep on playing to show them that...um, something. The fact that Te'o spent months talking about all the time he and his girlfriend had spent together in Hawaii, and how they'd met at a game? Te'o had fudged the truth, slightly embarrassed to admit that he had never met the love of his life. The fact that even by his own timeline, he'd found out about the hoax in early December, and had made public statements about his dead girlfriend right up until the story broke in January? He wasn't sure how to tell everyone about it all, and just decided to keep it under wraps until he could figure it out. The fact that he apparently never visited his dying girlfriend in the hospital, despite flying through her home city on his way back to Hawaii to visit his grandparents? "It just never crossed my mind."

And that's where I draw the line. I can believe gullibility, I can believe catfishing, I can believe that some people are really good liars and willing to take advantage of people...but I have been in a long-distance relationship. I met my current wife over the Internet. And I can tell you with 100% certainty, if you care anything at all about your long-distance significant other, you are going to make an effort to see them. If you are passing through the city where they live, during a period where you have free time, while she is dying of freaking cancer, not going to see her either means that you know she's a fake, or you're a sociopath of the highest order. And I am willing to give Te'o enough of the benefit of the doubt to believe that he's not a sociopath of the highest order.

I do feel kind of bad for him, of course. He's too stupid to know how to tell a believable lie about his fake Internet girlfriend. Saying that she made excuses to avoid him, that she told him she didn't want to see him with her hair missing or something? Barely plausible. Saying that it just slipped his mind to visit the dying girlfriend that he couldn't shut up about to the media while everyone thought she was real? You couldn't be clearer about the fact that you were BS'ing if you did the interview in a pile of horse manure.

Te'o's lying. Even if it's never proven (which is unlikely, given how much scrutiny is on him right now) I will always know it.

My Big Terminator Question

Why, apart from the obvious reason that his name was at one point a big box-office draw and he's currently attempting to suck the last dregs from the addictive teat of fame, does more than one Terminator ever look like Arnold Schwarzenegger? Let's remember, these are meant to be top secret infiltration devices, made to go where humans congregate without drawing attention to themselves, and then unleash a hellstorm of violence when the humans have dropped their guard. Doesn't it kind of give the game away if the human guards manning the barricades say, "Oh, crap! It's the former governor of California again! Aim for the eyes, I always freaking hated 'The Running Man'!"

I know that they did show Terminators with different faces in the original movie (although they still had a certain muscular bodybuilder look to them. Really, if you're going to be cunning in your pursuit of the human race, make a Terminator who looks like Wil Wheaton.) But in the second movie, we go right back to Ah-nuld, even though there is no sane, rational or sensible reason for John Connor to send back an identical duplicate of the T-800 that Skynet sent to kill his mother, and several extremely good reasons not to. (They almost died trying to convince Sarah that it wasn't the same Terminator, they almost died fighting cops convinced that they mysterious cop-killer had made a return appearance...) Really, the only person with a sensible reason to look like Arnie in T2 was the T1000, who has a vested interest in impersonating his counterpart to sow confusion and dissent among his targets, and he never does it.

Really, the only place it makes actual sense is in T3, the one that gets mocked by people who weren't paying attention for all the plot holes it doesn't have. There, Skynet sent a Terminator specifically to use John Connor's affection for the Schwarzenegger model against him, and it was captured and reprogrammed and sent back to stop the TX. (Which, you'll note, was also designed to look skinny and vulnerable and not like what people picture when they see a Terminator, because that's what you'd do with an infiltration unit. Because T3 was a much better sequel than T2, but nobody remembers that because hearing Arnie say, "liquid metal" and "Hasta la vista, baby," in an Austrian accent was so cool that it wiped everyone's memory of how stupid the plot was.)

Unfortunately, it's too late to suggest that maybe the Terminator series isn't exactly begging for a return appearance from a washed-up 80s action movie actor, or at least that if they want one of those, Steven Seagal is much cheaper. Schwarzenegger has already been signed for Terminator 5: You Knew It Was Going To Happen, and that's final. But could we at least see something different done with him?

We Miss You, Gilda Radner

For those of you unfamiliar with the world of football, the talk of the playoffs this year has been San Francisco. Even though they're the number two seed in the playoffs and will have to win a road game against the Atlanta Falcons, everyone's hot pick is the 49ers, and people can't stop gushing about the team's new wookie quarterback.

Don't get me wrong--I agree with everyone who said that coach Jim Harbaugh made a big gamble by benching Alex Smith and putting in a wookie at quarterback. And apparently it's paid off for them so far. I just don't know if it's a good idea. I mean, I can see the advantages; wookies are faster and stronger than humans, and a wookie quarterback could probably throw a football farther than even Joe Flacco's cannonball arm. Plus, a wookie would be awfully hard to bring down in the backfield, even for a sack artist like John Abraham.

But is a wookie temperamentally suited to the position of QB? Let's not forget, wookies are easily distracted by strong scents, particularly the smell of food, and pretty much every stadium in the country has a whole crowd of fans enjoying the offerings of the concessions stand. Do you really want to have to stand up at a post-game press conference and explain why, with two minutes left, your team captain leapt into the stands and started grabbing bratwursts away from people, gobbling them with both hands?

For that matter, wookies are infamous for their temper. They've been known to rip people's arms off for losing; is that really the kind of person you want under center in a tense game? Ron Jaworski once said that the most important skill a quarterback needs to have is amnesia, the ability to shrug off mistakes and go back out to win the game. A wookie quarterback is unlikely to be able to regain that kind of mental equilibrium, even if he doesn't get ejected for tearing Ray Lewis' legs off and beating him. (At the very least, this would cost his team fifteen yards in personal foul penalties at a time they can ill afford it.)

And if the NFL does allow wookie quarterbacks, what then? Will other teams respond with Trandoshan linebackers? Will we see Gamorrean tackles? Twi'lek wide receivers struggling to get their lekku under their helmets? Eventually, human beings will be crowded out of the sport completely in favor of some sort of violent alien gladiatorial contest. That's why, for the sake of the integrity of the sport, I think we need to tell San Francisco to bench their wook...wookie...

Oh. I see.

Never mind.

Possibly Interesting Question

Currently, copyright law in Britain puts the expiration date of copyright at 70 years from the death of the author. (The same holds true in America, although it's 120 years from creation/95 years from first publication for works for hire, although that isn't germane in this particular case for reasons that should become obvious shortly.)

Sax Rohmer, creator of Fu Manchu, perished in 1959. This means that in 2029, a relatively short sixteen years from now, Fu Manchu will go into the public domain. (unless his Fu Manchu novels were done as work for hire, which means that the copyright wouldn't expire any later than 95 years from 1913, date of publication of the first Fu Manchu novel. Since Fu Manchu didn't go into public domain five years ago, I think we can assume that it wasn't work for hire.)

My possibly interesting question is: Do you think that people will make use of Fu Manchu once the character becomes public domain? On the one hand, the "Yellow Peril" stereotype, which Fu Manchu exemplifies and arguably created, is at this point an embarrassing legacy of an era in which racial stereotypes were common and accepted. Pretty much any story involving Fu Manchu, in any medium, is going to be analyzed with a very skeptical eye by anyone who has any interest in racial sensitivity. These days, that's a lot of people (which is something I'm tremendously heartened by, honestly.)

On the other hand, modern sci-fi/fantasy is a descendant of the pulp novels like the Fu Manchu series, and in some ways is inextricably linked to them right at the roots. Anyone trying to make a serious exploration of the racial politics of cult fiction has to take the Yellow Peril stereotype into account, and if you're going to do that, what better symbol to use than the original Yellow Peril himself? (To say nothing of those people who just can't resist making use of an iconic character simply because he is an iconic character. There's already been at least one "Fu Manchu Versus Sherlock Holmes" novel, and I can imagine that it might be hard to resist the temptation to do a Fu Manchu/Dracula team-up, or a "Fu Manchu and the Cult of Cthulhu" story.)

I do believe there will be some use of the character starting in 2029; but given the problematic nature of the character, I'll be very interested to find out how much.

Self-Taught Superheroes, Part Nineteen

The portal chamber was huge. I mean, I was expecting something pretty big, because this was Lord Raptor and the portal chamber was the showpiece of his big plan to conquer a thousand worlds and stuff, so I knew his ego was going to make him overcompensate for...something. (Well, I mean, I also noticed that he did make his personal armor with a really silly-looking codpiece. But I'm refusing to guess why.) But the logistics of it made it even bigger.

After all, the whole thing was designed to move an army through. You needed to be able to file tanks into that thing three or four abreast, wheel airplanes and fly helicopters. The staging area on this side alone could probably have hosted a couple of games of football back to back. (And it opened out to the outside, which would have made me more nervous if Kevin hadn't insisted that he'd fused the door controls. Of course, knowing what I know now about Kevin, that actually makes me even more nervous in hindsight.) And the portal itself...it was monstrous. It dwarfed me. And in case you didn't think that sounded impressive because of my size, it dwarfed Captain Light, whose hair I have to stand on tippytoes to ruffle. This thing was giant, and it kind of intimidated us.

"You sure I can power this whole thing?" Josh said, looking a little bit nervous.

"Positive," Kevin said, cinching a weird metal band that looked sort of like the offspring of a blood pressure cuff and Robocop's armor around Josh's right arm. He began hooking up another one around the left. "You're powering a force field that can stop tank shells, discharging enough energy with each punch to dent battleship steel, and oh yeah, you're also projecting a psychokinetic field that can move two hundred pounds of mass at sixty miles an hour against the pull of gravity. And I'm guessing you don't get tired doing any of that, right?"

"Um...not sure," Josh said. "I mean, I don't exactly know what 'tired' feels like, so..." He flexed experimentally, and the cuff moved with him. "But you think that's more power than a nuclear reactor?"

Kevin fluttered his hand back and forth. "Well, I'm always going to side with the reactor, don't get me wrong, but...your energy source is a lot less lossy. There's no heat, no radiation, only a little bit of visible light...we can tap your energy directly, unlike a reactor, which is basically just a fancier way of boiling water to run a steam-powered turbine. I mean, I'm always working on ways to reduce the loss, but you can only go so far before you run into Maxwell's Demon, you know? Now, you...your body is doing some things that would reduce a lot of very talented physicists to nervous wrecks. Lucky for you I'm not a lot of physicists." He plugged a cable as thick as my wrist into each of the cuffs. "In fact, I'm just one." He paused. "Um. Little grammar joke, there."

Josh just nodded. He really did look pretty nervous about this whole thing. Then again, I'd probably have looked nervous if a physicist with crazy mad-scientist hair said he was going to use me as a living battery to power a teleportation jaunt halfway across the country. That was our plan, in case it wasn't clear to everyone. Josh, better known as Captain Light, was going to single-handedly power a dimensional portal that a full nuclear reactor couldn't get going for more than a few seconds at a time so that our seventy-odd hostages could scramble through it into the middle of Yankee Stadium (we needed a big open space, and we wanted somewhere public so that Lord Raptor wouldn't be able to go after them in retaliation. And John Q. Public is a Sox fan.) So yeah, I was learning that real life was like the comics in one key aspect--we came up with some pretty crazy stuff and passed it off as a "plan".

Kevin tightened up a few more connections on the portal end, then flicked a few switches. "Okay, co-ordinates are set...receptors are aligned...attractors are spinning...we're all set here, just waiting for power on your end."

"How do I do that?" Josh asked. "I mean, I don't normally think about using my power. It just sort of...happens. When I hit things, they break, when things hit me, they break...it's not really conscious, you know?"

Kevin shrugged. "I don't know. Try to hover or something."

Josh closed his eyes, slowly lifted an inch or three off the ground...and the portal began to open. It was like nothing I'd ever seen before. It looked like the desert on a really hot day, the kind where the air is shimmering in the heat like you're watching it all through a veil of tears, but at the same time, it was spinning, too. The wall on the other side of the portal looked distorted, warped and almost melted in a weird, sickening way...and then it resolved itself into another place. A place with green grass, and a throng of cheering fans whose cheering slowly stopped dead.

We all watched in total fascination. It seemed so surreal, like everything we'd ever believed about our world had just gone and dissolved. It seemed like some sort of crazy, big-screen TV with perfect sound and perfect picture. I almost didn't believe it was real until the baseball rolled through it.

That snapped us all out of our stupor. "Go!" I shouted to the hostages. "Go, run, move, go go go go go!" I realized I sounded like Biff McLargeHuge or something, but I couldn't stop myself. The hostages didn't need my encouragement, that was for sure. They saw the outside world for the first time in a month and they ran for it. I helped the last few through, the ones who'd gotten sick or injured during their stint of hard labor, and then made a last quick scan around for stragglers.

What I saw was John Q. Public staggering to his feet, and Lord Raptor already at the side door hammering away at the keypad.

Should We Know Who the Enemy Was?

This is sort of "old business", and very Who-related, so I apologize in advance for those of you who come here for other things and don't care much about pre-Eccleston Who. But before there was the Time Wars that destroyed the Time Lords, there was the War. Same basic premise--the Time Lords were fighting a war against a time-active power just as powerful as they are, but with two key differences--one, the war occurred in the Doctor's personal future, starting the day he died as Gallifrey's enemies finally felt safe enough to move against them. The glimpses the Doctor got of the War (starting with 'Alien Bodies') were scenes from his own personal future, but simply knowing about it warped it and brought it ominously closer.

And two, which is more relevant here, the enemy wasn't the Daleks. In fact, the enemy's identity was never satisfactorily explained. Lawrence Miles, who wrote most of the significant novels in the War arc, intended them to be someone other than the Daleks, but the novel in which he finally intended to reveal their identity was never published. Instead, then-line editor Stephen Cole co-wrote a novel called 'The Ancestor Cell', where they were explained as a collection of technobabble from the dawn of time shortly before the War arc, and Gallifrey, were neatly excised from the line never to be mentioned again.

Lawrence Miles, in turn, went on to write a spin-off series in which the Time Lords and the War are carefully changed just enough that he can use his own concepts freely, called 'Faction Paradox'. In it, the enemy is simply known as The Enemy, with the details of their identity being described as "irrelevant".

As a fan of both Doctor Who and Faction Paradox, I'm not sure this was the right move. At this point, I think that the identity of the Enemy risks drifting gradually into irrelevance if not revealed, while revealing it might drum up useful publicity for a somewhat cult spin-off. I'd really like to see Lawrence Miles (ideally) write a book that explains who the Enemy was intended to be, or if that's not possible due to rights issues (it was hinted at as being an old foe of the Doctor's in some way, shape or form) at least get it out in an interview who it was originally intended to be so we finally can put the question to rest. However, I'll admit that part of my desire just stems from being a fan who hates unsolved mysteries, so I can't say I'm unbiased here. Anyone else remember the Enemy? And do those people want to see it come back and get finally answered? Feel free to make your thoughts known in the comments!

Review: Whispers Underground

'Whispers Underground' is the third book in what appears to be an ongoing series (wonderfully, author Ben Aaronovitch has said that he plans to keep going until he can afford a yacht) about Peter Grant, official apprentice to the last officially-sanctioned wizard in Britain. Although, as one of the threads running through the novel shows, the last officially-sanctioned wizard is very much not the same thing as the last wizard. This thread, which was frustrating to me at the end of 'Moon Over Soho', has been developed quite well here (there's a great gag where the mysterious rogue wizard leaves a psychic trap in Elvish that Tolkien fans translate as, "If you can read this, not only are you dead but you're also a huge nerd.") I don't even mind the fact that it's still dangling by the end of this book, now that I'm used to the idea.

One of the other minor complaints I had about the last book turns out to have been very well-thought out for the long haul as well. Not to unduly spoil 'Moon Over Soho', but Peter has a very different attitude when it comes to "monsters" than his superior. In the last book, this kind of came to nothing, because fate sort of took its own course, but that only heightened the tension of this novel. When Peter finds an entire underground civilization beneath London, one with a tangled and extra-legal relationship with the seedier denizens of the city, the question of what exactly is going to happen to them once the larger world finds out becomes all the more razor-edged due to the events of 'Moon Over Soho'. By showing that the world isn't always cute and cuddly towards the inhuman, Aaronovitch gives us one more reason to find the story gripping.

And it is. What starts as an ordinary murder turns into an exploration of the magical underworld, literal and figurative, of London. It's exciting stuff, and Aaronovitch makes it (as always) witty and exciting and funny and scary and nerve-wracking and just generally excellent. Oh, and recurring character Lesley May gets a hugely expanded role for this one, which is just plain awesome because she deserves it.

In case I'm not being clear here, this one's a good buy too.

Three Reasons Why Doctor Who Books Need To Come Back

Technically speaking, I should start by pointing out that Doctor Who books aren't actually gone. In fact, there's something like five lines of Doctor Who fiction out there--the basic novels, which have been a bit dormant but will see three new releases in April; a line of fancy hardcovers that have attracted jaw-droppingly good authors like Stephen Baxter and Michael Moorcock (I'm still holding out hope for a Harlan Ellison entry in this series, although I know it's not going to happen); a line of "Quick Reads" designed to be finished over a lunch-break; a kid's series of 2-in-1 novels; and a Choose Your Own Adventure-esque run of books. After all that, I can kind of understand why the BBC doesn't want a line of novels for the classic series cluttering up the works.

Nonetheless, I miss the books that were coming out before the TV series relaunched in 2005. Even though there was a fairly steep dip in quality during the changeover from Virgin to the BBC, the book series had recovered reasonably well by the end, and produced some really excellent work like 'The Tomorrow Windows', 'Camera Obscura' and 'Fear Itself'. It's a line that deserved to continue on its own merits and on the merits of its sales...but there are also three other reasons I'd bring back the Past Doctor Adventures book line.

1) There is a place for a line of Doctor Who books for older fans. I realize that this is a very fine line to walk, because Doctor Who is a family series and I don't want to see younger fans excluded...but at the same time, the genie's kind of out of the bottle, here. For a good fifteen years, the Doctor Who series was written with an eye towards the older fan, and we got to see stories written for a more mature reader...and I don't necessarily mean that in terms of sex and violence, either. 'Love and War', to choose a particularly excellent and seminal example, examines the Doctor's relationship with his companions and his ultimately alien perspective on the universe in a way that the TV series will never be able to do, simply because I don't think the TV series is willing to risk that kind of unsympathetic view of the Doctor. Not every book was that good or that mature (I'm looking at you, Chris Bulis) but there was a potential there that shouldn't be discarded.

2) The book line served as a laboratory for improving the series. Because the book line was for older fans, and because it wasn't under the pressure of being a flagship show on Saturday nights, they had a lot of license to experiment. The book lines came up with a number of interesting ideas, like a time-travelling archaeologist, or a human/Time Lord hybrid able to deal with the Doctor on his own level, or a view of the Doctor as a myth scattered throughout human history, or a Time War that would lead to the destruction of Gallifrey and the end of the Time Lords, or...basically, re-reading the books (like I'm doing here alongside my wife, just as a reminder) shows just how much of the concepts that became essential to the success of the new series came out of people trying new takes on a classic series and seeing what worked. That's the kind of thing that can and should happen again.

3) The book line gave a lot of excellent writers their first break. The Doctor Who book line had an open submissions policy, both in the Virgin and BBC era, and a lot of fans made the jump to pro through the book line. Paul Cornell, Mark Gatiss, Gareth Roberts, Gary Russell (whatever you may think of his work) and Matt Jones all went from fan to novelist to TV writer, and even some of the already established TV writers (like Moffat and RTD) started their work for Doctor Who in the novels. It didn't always work--we got the occasional Neil Penswick--but it really encouraged a lot of talented people and gave them an opening, which is something that I think feels appropriate for the BBC to do.

There are more reasons, some of which really can't be done right now due to the narrative primacy of the TV show...but I think there's a place for a line of well-written adult novels in Doctor Who, even now. I just don't know if the BBC will see it my way anytime soon.

Thoughts on the Doctor Who Christmas Special

I showed extraordinary patience yesterday by waiting to watch this year's Doctor Who Christmas Special--most of my family was en route back to Minnesota when it aired, and far too exhausted to sit through it when they got home a bit later. As such, it wasn't until tonight that I saw the continuation of the series. Some thoughts below the cut, for those who are waiting longer still...

Why Doctor Who Doesn't Work In Fantasy

Someone (I believe it was Paul Magrs, but I'm not entirely sure) once said that the TARDIS isn't a machine for traveling in time and space, it's a machine for traveling between genres. This is certainly in evidence in the new series, with the Doctor wandering through Westerns and horror stories and all manner of big-budget Hollywood blockbusters, but it's been a part of the series almost since the beginning. Sometimes the story is a comedy, sometimes a tragedy, sometimes out and out horror, and yet somehow the Doctor seems naturally to fit into all of them. It's one of the things that has made the series so refreshingly renewable over the years; the Doctor has been able to essentially borrow from whatever's modern to make himself seem relevant.

And yet, when you look at the few attempts to blend in with fantasy, they've almost always been dreadful failures. 'Cat's Cradle: Witch Mark', 'Autumn Mist'...really, about the best of them was 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice', and that keyed on the idea that there was no such thing. Even Paul Cornell's take on "The Doctor does a trip into a fantasy universe" was his weakest novel, and he's sodding brilliant. Why is it that the Doctor can't go into a high fantasy novel the same way he can wander into a Western or a crime caper?

The most obvious answer, of course, is that Doctor Who doesn't do fantasy. It's firmly set in a rational universe with an orderly set of scientific rules, even if they are handwavy "psychic paper" and "sonic screwdriver" and "anti-plastic" type rules. People will point out that a sonic screwdriver is basically just a magic wand with a different name, but that misses the point. It's the name that's actually important. Doctor Who states that everything is explicable, even if we aren't smart enough or experienced enough or knowledgable enough to understand the explanation yet. That's a pretty key difference from a world where High Prophecy and gods simply tell you that this is the way things are.

That means that whenever the Doctor enters a fantasy universe, one of two things has to happen. Either first, he has to come up with a scientific explanation for it all. These are usually leaden and dull, and tend to reduce the whole thing to an exercise in mapping handwavy science fiction explanations onto handwavy fantasy explanations. There's nothing intrinsically exciting about a horse with a horn on it, even if it's a horn with extra brain in it that gives the horse telepathy. Fantasy is all about the poetic and the symbolic, not the literal; things are not necessarily meant to have an explanation.

The alternative is that the Doctor surrenders his narrative primacy, acknowledging that yes, this is magic and cannot be understood, even by a Time Lord. This is in some ways the far worse alternative, because the thing that's special about the Doctor when he travels to another genre is the way he warps it about himself. The Doctor is fun to read about in a Western because he doesn't carry a gun and he wanders off to talk to the Native Americans and comes back as an honorary member of the tribe. The Doctor is fun to read about in a crime caper because he wanders into the head office of the local mob boss and says, "Hello, can I have a spot of tea with you while we chat about the murders you've committed?" The Doctor is, in a good story, the center of the narrative. That doesn't happen when he goes into a fantasy story. Instead, he has to follow the rules of that world. The Doctor is never fun when he's following the rules.

I won't say that it's impossible to do a Doctor Who story that involves fantasy elements--'Battlefield' pulls it off by suggesting that a future Doctor will be the one to square the circle and deal with magic on its home ground--but for the reasons above, I think it's far riskier to try and there's less payoff. My advice to future Doctor Who authors would probably be, "If you want to write a high fantasy novel...go have fun. There's plenty of publishers out there who take 'em."

Random Trailer Thoughts

I went out and saw 'The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey' over the weekend, and while I don't know that I'm ready to write about the movie, I'm interested in writing about the trailers a bit. No trailers for 'Man of Steel' or 'Star Trek...INTO DARKNESS!' (I've decided that this is the correct way to write the title), but we did get some interesting ones. Random thoughts follow:

1) Were the makers of 'The Lone Ranger' going for an emotional sensation of "sad and empty inside, except maybe with a quiet ache that tells you you've given up on joy"? Because if it was, they freaking nailed it. Every moment of that trailer looked joyless, mechanical and dull, compensating for a lack of emotion with sound and fury. And it's also a classic case of Hollywood whitewashing, with Johnny Depp getting dressed up like a Native American so that they have a "name" actor in a major role. This screams "terrible" to me.

2) 'Warm Bodies' looks cute, but I'm not sold on the idea of "super-evil zombies" for the regular zombies to show how nice they are by opposing. Still, it does look like an entertaining parody of the "paranormal romance" sub-genre that has become a bit too prevalent since 'Twilight' hit the stands. (This is not to say, by way of clarification, that I am against them in principle. There are some great writers out there doing paranormal romance stories, like local author Mary Janice Davidson for example. Just saying that they're cranking them out a bit.)

3) 'Epic'...at this point, I kind of feel like the non-Pixar studios (Dreamworks, Fox Animation) have solidified their position as the bland, generically acceptable time-waster alternative to Pixar. Want a kid's movie that's CGI and kind of funny and exciting, but don't want to worry that actual quality might challenge your kid's mind in some way? Spend two hours in front of a film by the creators of 'Ice Age'! It'll be like they never watched anything at all! Basically, I'm saying that there is a very narrow band of quality to a picture like this, and this probably is going to be neither bad nor good. It will be there.

4) I was really surprised to find out that 'After Earth' wasn't a very clever reworking of the narrative-free, but extremely cool book 'After Man' into an actual science fiction movie. I thought I actually recognized some of the animal designs from the book. Now the only real reason I had to see this is gone. (Clever stunt casting, though, making Will and Jaden into an actual father/son team.)

5) Is it just me, or does 'Oblivion' feel vaguely like every other movie you've ever seen? Just something about every scene seems to conspire to give you a vague sense of deja vu. Underground rebels, Tom Cruise as One Man Determined to Find Out the TRUTH, creepy laser drones...it just all seems kind of "been there, done that".

6) I like the idea of 'Pacific Rim', but it does kind of feel like it'd be hard to stretch out the concept beyond what we've already seen in the trailers. I mean, they show us that big monsters climb out of a hole in reality that opened up under the Pacific Ocean, they show that they rampage a bunch, and they show that human beings build giant robots to fight them. Isn't that pretty much the movie, right there? I mean, is there a plot twist that you could wring out of that, or is the only bit we didn't see in the trailer going to be, "And the humans win. The End!"? (I felt kind of the same way about 'Real Steel', by the way.)

7) Wow, we got a lot of trailers. In addition to all those, we also got 'Beautiful Creatures', which felt like your bog-standard "Hey, that 'Twilight' thing is doing pretty well. Let's find something kind of similar to that, then adapt it and make a few million!" I don't think I'd enjoy this. Then again, I don't think I'm the target audience.

See any trailers you liked last weekend? Talk about them in the comments!

Roger Goodell and the New Football

Football commissioner Roger Goodell has been talked about a lot lately by football pundits. He's taking a lot of flack at the moment; his announcement that the NFL is talking about replacing the kickoff is being viewed with approximately the same amount of enthusiasm as New Coke, the recent changes to enforcement of illegal hits are being viewed as an attempt to neuter the game, and of course, everyone who follows football knows that his suspensions for the New Orleans players who deliberately attempted to injure their opponents have been vacated by his predecessors. (For those of you who don't follow football, um, yeah. I talk about it sometimes. Sorry if it's not your thing.)

But here's the thing--there's a common element to all of these stories (along with a couple of other ones floating around the periphery, like expanding the playoffs to 14 teams and possibly creating new teams in LA and London.) Reading them and hearing them gives me a lot of sympathy for Goodell. Because what he's trying to do is change the culture of football, and that doesn't come easily.

Historically, football players have prided themselves not so much on speed or strength as on "toughness"--the ability to endure pain and continue to play at a professional level. Men like Ronnie Lott were admired for their determination to get back on the field no matter what the consequences (Lott literally had part of his finger amputated rather than undergo surgery that would keep him off the field.) Dishing out punishment to your opponent, and showing that you can take more punishment than your opponent, was considered to be how you proved yourself as a real man on the field.

But the players that played in that era are old men now. More specifically, they are crippled old men--a lifetime of playing in that environment has left them with brain damage, arthritis, atrophied muscles and misfiring nerves...it is becoming clear to everyone that the problem with sacrificing your body for victories on the field is that the victories on the field last only a moment, while the pain and weakness lasts a lifetime. If for no other reason than simple legal considerations, the NFL has to take an active role in trying to reduce the number of on-field injuries. At the very least, they open themselves up to negligence lawsuits if they don't.

But since pretty much everyone announcing, commentating, and generally professionally opining on football is a former player, they all come out of the old culture where enduring pain was a point of pride. Paul Tagliabue's vacation of the Saints' suspension boiled down to "Yes, these players did deliberately accept money to try to injure players on the opposing team in an effort to knock them out of the game, but I don't think that's worth suspending anyone over." Troy Aikman and Kurt Warner admitted on 'Mike and Mike' that they didn't see what the big deal was...they knew that defenses were trying to injure them the entire time they played, and they just saw it as part of the game. Let's stress this--a man who retired because he suffered double-digit concussions is saying that he doesn't think it's a big deal to try to knock someone out of a game. The cognitive dissonance is absolutely stunning.

It's the same with all of these changes, really. The change to the kickoff sounds like it would actually be great for the game above and beyond simply reducing injuries (the scoring team gets the ball back with 4th and 15 from the 30, so they basically punt instead of kicking off. But since there's about a 10% higher chance of converting a 4th and 15 than recovering an onside kick, it might make the last few minutes of games that much more exciting.) But old-school players like Mike Ditka think it's a terrible idea, because they feel like the kickoff is where you separate the men from the boys in football. In the case of Ditka, it separates the men with hip replacements from the boys, but Ditka doesn't seem to make that connection.

Ultimately, whatever the players and pundits say, the changes will be made. Even if Goodell is scapegoated and driven out of the commissioner position as too heavy-handed, the next guy to come in will make them. There's too much money at stake if the players file a lawsuit for them not to make football a safer game. And ultimately, despite what the current crop of sports pundits say, that's a good thing. Perhaps it will be less of a "macho" pursuit, getting out on the gridiron...but it'll also mean that the players at the reunion might not be using two canes to get around.

Reviews: Ghosts of India and Shining Darkness

Re-reading the classic New Adventures (alongside my lovely wife, who blogs with me about them here) has had the unfortunate side effect of reminding me just how much of a shadow of their former selves the Doctor Who novels have become since the relaunch of the new TV series. Back when people like Paul Cornell and Gareth Roberts wrote for the books, instead of the TV show, we got vibrant and exciting new fiction that felt like it was more than just a line of tie-in books. Great new authors like Kate Orman and Lawrence Miles got their voices heard, the books were aimed for the first time at my generation, and they felt like the future of Doctor Who...because, looking back, they pretty much were. The New Series Adventures don't have that same verve, even if they do occasionally score big wins like Michael Moorcock's first Doctor Who novel.

'Ghosts of India', by Mark Morris, is a pretty good example of what we get now. It's not a bad novel, don't get me wrong. You won't mistake this one for 'The Pit', or even for 'Deep Blue' by the same author. But it's exactly the sort of thing you'd expect from a Doctor Who tie-in novel. The Doctor and Insert Companion Here (Donna) go to Insert Significant Time and Place Here (India in 1947, just as they were regaining their independence) and meet Insert Major Historical Figure Here (Ghandi, who's treated as a generic Wise Mentor figure for the most part with absolutely no effort to delve into the man's complex personal history) and fight Insert Alien Menace Here (the Jal Kalath, who manage to be basically an unmemorable collection of syllables that's EVIL!) to stop Insert Horrific Thing Here (evil radiation making people go insane and murderous, which is about as generic a Horrific Thing as you can get.) It's sort of a cross between a novel and a Doctor Who Mad Libs. Nothing to get upset about, nothing to get excited about, just something to while away a couple of hours reading and then put on the shelf.

But on the other hand, there are still embers of the old books flickering about if you have the patience to read through them all. Mark Michalowski, who was something of a latecomer to the old BBC line but who proved his writing chops pretty clearly, still has the enthusiasm to write something worth reading. 'Shining Darkness' mostly eschews continuity references to produce a funny, romping twist on the old "quest" story. It's still a book pitched considerably younger than, say, 'The Man In the Velvet Mask' (no companions getting STDs, you don't have to know who the Marquis de Sade was), but it's got some clever and witty sequences, the Doctor and Donna come off the page well, and there are enough red herrings floating about that the final plot twist actually caught me off-guard. It's definitely a nice reminder of how even though the new series has eclipsed the books almost completely, you can still find a few treasures in the dark.

A Suggestion for the Next Star Trek Series

Obviously, the current regime over at Paramount has decided that the foreseeable future for the Star Trek franchise is in the form of new movies. And frankly, as long as the movies look as good as 'Star Trek Into Darkness', I will be interested no matter how silly the names get. (Future films will no doubt have names like 'Star Trek Up the Khyber', 'Star Trek Screaming', and 'Star Trek At Your Convenience'.) (Trust me, there are people laughing right now, even if you're not one of them.)

But eventually, I'm sure that the Star Trek of my teen/young adult years will develop its own nostalgia, and we'll see a return to the small screen, and a return to the Federation of the 24th century. When that happens, there's something I'd like to see addressed, and it comes out of the problem of Wesley Crusher.

Because there is a problem with Wesley Crusher, and it's got nothing to do with him being a science nerd or him being uncomfortably similar to the show's target audience (oh, come on, you knew most of the Wesley-hate was thinly-disguised self-loathing, even then.) The problem is that Wesley is a civilian, and even as the son of the Chief Medical Officer, there's really no good way for him to interact with the bridge crew without it seeming like authorial fiat. This, in turn, exacerbates the Mary Sue feeling the character has, as he's an ordinary civilian who's somehow always able to wander onto the bridge and take a seat at Comms whenever he wants to. Wesley really needs to be interacting with other civilians, and be given something to do as a normal teenager on board a starship.

Which, on thinking about it, opens up all sorts of possibilities. Because while it was mentioned from time to time in passing that the Enterprise had a civilian population, nothing was ever really done with that. What were they there for? After all, it's not generally like we slap a civilian population onto a battleship. The Enterprise was a vessel that saw combat; why did it have civilians? What purpose did they serve? Then there's the next big question: Who did they answer to? After all, if they answered to Picard, then they weren't really civilians. If the only authority on the ship was a military authority, then they're under military jurisdiction. The specific mention of them as "civilians", the careful distinction of their roles, implies a civilian authority. We're told that the Enterprise is the size of a city; is there a Mayor of the Enterprise?  Or, for that matter, a Burgomeister, a Prefect, a Sindaco, or a ChoCho? Does Picard meet personally with the Mayor, or is there a Civilian Liason Officer? Are there conflicts? (If nothing else, there's bound to be a conflict over the fact that there's a cityful of people on board and only one bar.)

To me, this feels like a whole area that never got explored, one which could prove potentially interesting indeed. If nothing else, it would give Wesley something to do until he became an Ensign.

It's Stockholm Syndrome, But It's a Better Rhyme Scheme

My friends have all heard this ad nauseum, but...every time I hear the song 'Stacy's Mom', or even every time it gets stuck in my head like the earworm it is, I get frustrated anew. Because "Mom" does not rhyme with "on". They have different consonant sounds. For that matter, "wrong" does not rhyme with "Mom" either. Every time I hear the song, it grates on my inner ear like biting down on tinfoil. As such, I have decided to correct the lyrics of the song. It may be a somewhat different story, but at least the rhymes work.


Stacy's mom has tied me to a bomb
Stacy's mom has tied me to a bomb
Stacy's mom has tied me to a bomb
Stacy's mom has tied me to a bomb

Stacy knows I came over after school? (after school)
Just to hang around by the pool (hang by the pool)
But her mom got back from her 'business trip'? (business trip)
She had plans to set a bomb off, give the cops the slip? (give 'em the slip)

I freaked a bit at first but then it kind of grew on me
Dying's kind of hot, baby can't you see

Stacy's mom has tied me to a bomb
But I don't mind, I feel a certain calm
Stacy, can't you see you're just not the girl for me
She's tied me to a bomb but I'm in love with Stacy's mom

Stacy's mom has tied me to a bomb
Stacy's mom has tied me to a bomb

Stacy, do you remember when I mowed your lawn? (mowed your lawn)
Your mom came out with just a towel on (towel on)
I could tell she liked me from the way she stared (the way she stared)
And the way she chloroformed me over there (drugged me over there)

And I know that you think she wants to murder me
But since your dad walked out, your mom could use a guy like me

Stacy's mom has tied me to a bomb
But I don't mind, I feel a certain calm
Stacy, can't you see you're just not the girl for me
She's tied me to a bomb but I'm in love with Stacy's mom

Stacy's mom has tied me to a bomb
But I don't mind, I feel a certain calm
Stacy, can't you see you're just not the girl for me
She's tied me to a bomb but I'm in love with Stacy's mom
(She tied me to a bomb)
I'm in love with (Stacy's mom oh oh)
(Stacys mom oh oh)
I'm in love with Stacy's mom