Simple Tricks and Nonsense

Friday Fun and Games -- Quiz Time!

Because it's Friday -- and because I'm feeling too lazy right now to actually write anything -- I decided to follow my friend Jen's example and take the Nerd Test. The results were surprisingly gratifying:

Modern, Cool Nerd 69 % Nerd, 69% Geek, 39% Dork

For The Record: A Nerd is someone who is passionate about learning/being smart/academia. A Geek is someone who is passionate about some particular area or subject, often an obscure or difficult one. A Dork is someone who has difficulty with common social expectations/interactions. You scored better than half in Nerd and Geek, earning you the title of: Modern, Cool Nerd. Nerds didn't use to be cool, but in the 90's that all changed. It used to be that, if you were a computer expert, you had to wear plaid or a pocket protector or suspenders or something that announced to the world that you couldn't quite fit in. Not anymore. Now, the intelligent and geeky have eked out for themselves a modicum of respect at the very least, and "geek is chic." The Modern, Cool Nerd is intelligent, knowledgable and always the person to call in a crisis (needing computer advice/an arcane bit of trivia knowledge). They are the one you want as your lifeline in Who Wants to Be a Millionaire (or the one up there, winning the million bucks)! Congratulations!

My test tracked 3 variables to see how you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 69% on nerdiness You scored higher than 92% on geekosity You scored higher than 67% on dork points

And just for kicks, here's another one that should land me on a few "persona non grata" lists, at least here in red-state Utah:

You are a Social Liberal (70% permissive) and an... Economic Liberal (18% permissive) You are best described as a: Socialist Link: The Politics Test on Ok Cupid

Funny... I don't feel like a pinko...

Muppet Links

As a follow-up to the previous entry, I thought I'd direct you to some of the Muppet-related stuff I've run across on the Internets.

First up is some more on Jerry Juhl, although still nothing from the professional press. Guess the passing of a mere scribe who contributed to some of the most beloved pop-cultural creations of the last 50 years doesn't merit anyone's attention; no, it's far more important to detail the latest efforts of loopy trailer-trash diva and professional gold-digger Anna Nicole Smith to get her mitts on her dead hubby's money. Luckily, however, we've got fans and bloggers with the wherewithal to do what must be done and pay tribute where it's due.

We begin with the official statement of The Jim Henson Company itself, which include these lovely thoughts from Jim Henson's daughter Lisa:

“So much of the humor, irreverence, caring and heart that has been central to our work for 50 years began with Jerry Juhl. He was – in many ways – the real voice of The Muppets and of every project from The Jim Henson Company.”

Over at Jim Hill Media, you'll find not just one but two articles on Jerry. The first, by Mr. Hill himself, is the most detailed account I've seen of how Juhl got involved with Jim Henson's inspired lunacy and how his role in the organization grew and evolved over the years. The second one is a bit more your standard appreciation:

I've always admired Jerry's talents and thought of him as the godfather of Muppets. He took good care of the Muppets after Jim Henson passed away. He was the man that carried the secret recipe to that special Muppet humor that we all know. I just felt that -- without Jerry -- the Muppets would be lost.

Then, the corners of my mouth began to turn up as a wry smile bgan to cross my face. A small voice in the back of my head said to me: "Lost? Have you tried Hari Krishna?" It was then that I began to relax a bit and realize that the Muppets would live on thanks to the tremendous care and love Jerry had put into their personalities.

(I don't agree with that writer's sentiment about the Muppets living on; as I said yesterday, I think the true Muppets, the mildly subversive ones who hadn't yet become "properties," have been marketed into extinction. But the quote was worth repeating for that Hare Krishna joke, which is classic Muppetism.)

Author Neil Gaiman took time from a busy book tour to mention Jerry, and reflect that he once "got to eat ice-cream with [him], and talk Muppet history and everything. He was an incredibly nice, funny, wise man, and we corresponded by email afterwards, a little, and I sent him books." And I located an interview with Juhl himself. Done a few years back, it includes a lot of interesting tidbits about The Muppet Show, Fraggle Rock (which I don't think I've ever seen), and an unproduced Muppet movie that could've been really, really funny.

Finally, just so this thing doesn't end on too melancholy a note, and because it's a Friday and we need some diversions, here are a few fun links:

The Kermitage, a Web site that's all about classic Muppet Show, complete with trivia and episode guides;

Bert is Evil, an Internet oldie-but-goodie;

Bert: The Rolling Stone Interview, wherein we learn of the simmering professional jealousy between Bert and Kermit;

and my personal favorite of these, Grover is Bitter, a hilarious VH1-style retelling of the rise and tragic fall of a cute, furry monster from Queens. The usual antics involving booze and hookers are here, but pay particular attention to the little red protege -- it's just like All About Eve!

Oh, and finally finally, here's a classic Jerry Juhl-penned Muppet joke:

Q. What do you do with a wombat?
A. You play wom with it.

The Rainbow Connection

What a sad coincidence -- the very same day I learn that the Muppets are going to be honored with a set of official U.S. postage stamps, I also learn that Jerry Juhl, one of the men who made the Muppets into the icons we all know and love, has died.

If you've never heard of Juhl, don't feel bad. His name was never as well-known as those of Jim Henson or Frank Oz. Nevertheless, Juhl was instrumental in bringing the foam critters with the wry, gentle senses of humor to life. He was with Jim in the very beginning, before Sesame Street or The Muppet Show, back when the Muppets were strange little creatures appearing in advertisements and space-filler segments on a local TV channel in Washington, D.C. Juhl started as a performer for Jim, but eventually evolved into a writer, and it was in this role that he had the most influence over what the Muppets ultimately became. Through his scripts for the aforementioned TV shows and later the first four feature films that starred the Muppets, he helped to create or develop most of the major characters that populate the Henson empire, notably Fozzie Bear and The Great Gonzo.

Curiously, I haven't found any mention of Jerry Juhl's passing in the mainstream press, even though he apparently died on Monday following a short battle with cancer. I heard about it, not surprisingly, from Evanier, who directed me to a very nice tribute written by Ken Plume of the FilmForce Web site. As Ken so nicely puts it:

...much of what we know and identify as being indelibly "Muppety" is due to the wit and wonder of Juhl's writing.

I thrived on that wit and wonder in my younger days. Like everybody else who grew up in the '70s, I acquired a lot of my early education from Sesame Street, a show I continued watching for years after I was too old for it, just because I loved the Muppet segments. I used to watch The Muppet Show, too, every Sunday afternoon at my grandmother's house, sprawled on my belly in front of her old '60s-vintage console television with the oddly rounded screen, my cousins Stacey and Kori at my side. Grandma always fretted that it wasn't natural for kids to be watching TV on such beautiful afternoons, that we ought to be outside playing and that we were somehow being harmed by the silliness on the tube, but if she knew about the warm glow I still get when thinking of those days, I think she'd understand that everything turned out alright.

Grandma always dismissed the Muppets as stupid kid-stuff. She never understood that, while they were child-friendly and simple in execution, they were definitely not stupid. Like the Looney Tune cartoons before them, the various Muppet projects worked on two layers of humor: the silly sight-gags and slapstick that even very young kids can get, and a more sophisticated form largely based on character. Many of the truly attrocious puns heard on TMS were based on literary or cultural references, and you had to be pretty quick to get all of them. The Muppets never talked down to kids, as so many characters on children's shows seem to do these days. They were like the rare adult who genuinely likes and understands kids, and they were genuinely funny, too. And they were sweet characters, as well; there was real pathos in many of the Muppets' adventures, and in the insecurities displayed by all the major characters from time to time. The fact that they were all animals made out of foam and fur and feathers did not affect their humanity in the least. Kermit the Frog, in particular, is simply one of the most decent characters ever created.

Yes, I loved the Muppets. I had a Muppet poster on my bedroom wall, just opposite from one of C-3PO and R2-D2, and somewhere down in the Bennion Archives, I've still got a well-worn LP record of The Muppet Movie soundtrack. If you got me liquoured up enough, I'd probably even sing "The Rainbow Connection" for you -- I still remember the lyrics. But as with so many other things I loved as a child, something went wrong with the Muppets in the '90s. Growing up obviously changed my perspective on them, but there were other factors, too. Things changed after Jim Henson died. The Muppets went on in his absence, but they started to seem less like living, breathing people and more like products to be packaged and sold. The ruthless and unending merchandising of Elmo, and the way that furry little bastard has shouldered aside ever other character on Sesame is a perfect example. At some point in the mid-90s, without its founder to guide it, the Henson Company lost its soul. Not surprisingly, this is also about the time that Jerry Juhl left the organization. If Jim was the soul of the Muppets, Jerry was the wit, and there's been precious little of either in recent Muppet offerings. And that, I suppose, is all the tribute Jerry Juhl requires. He and Jim and Frank Oz were the true Rainbow Connection, and now Frank is all that remains and their creations are little more than shambling revenants as far as I'm concerned. But that's the way it goes, I guess. A lot of things that I loved in my youth, that I always thought would be eternal, have turned out to be unexpectedly fragile. They weren't meant to last after all.

Kermit would've understood that sentiment, I think, and Juhl's favorite, the terminally weird and always a little-bit-sad Gonzo, definitely would have.

There'll Be No One to Stop Us This Time...

Media critic Jaime J. Weinman maintains a pretty interesting blog called Something Old, Nothing New, on which he writes about the films, TV shows, theater, and music that interest him personally. As the title of the blog suggests, the focus is primarily on properties that are best described as "vintage." (That means most of what this guy likes was made before you were born, kids.)

Today Jaime is discussing Alfred Hitchcock's artistic decline following Psycho, the film for which he's probably best known today, at least among the general, non-cinemaholic public. Jaime draws an interesting parallel between "Hitch" and The Great Flanneled One, George Lucas, pointing out that both men, upon achieving great power and autonomy in the wake of monstrous success, started making really bad creative decisions.

It's a point I agree with. I've long maintained that there's nothing wrong with the Star Wars prequels that couldn't have been solved with an simple rewrite, or if someone had been willing to tell Uncle George, "That's not such a good idea...", or even to ask the simple question, "Why?" But no one dared do that because he is... George Lucas. And who is George Lucas? Contrary to the hysterical griping of disappointed ex-fanboys, he is not a talentless hack nor is he an evil money-grubber who's more interested in the merchandising than the story. What he is, is a guy who thinks he doesn't have to answer to anyone anymore. He thinks he did his part for king and country and now he doesn't need to explain himself. I don't blame him; if I was in his position, I wouldn't want to be questioned either. The man reshaped the way movies are made, for God's sake. But then so did Hitchcock in his day. And the same thing happened to his films that have happened to George's. Go read Jaime to learn more...

[UPDATE: Interesting. Jaime has added an afterthought to his own post since I wrote this, downplaying the independence angle that caught my interest in the first place. Maybe Hitch was just getting old and suffering from a lack of confidence, he suggests. Maybe so... and maybe that applies to GL as well. Hard to say, I guess, without knowing the man. In any event, it's still an interesting post and worth your time if you can spare it.]

Where's Kirk Douglas When You Need Him?

One of the coolest things I ever saw on TV when I was a kid -- "coolest" in the sense of "scared the hell out of me but in a good way" -- was the famous scene of the giant squid attacking the Nautilus in Disney's 1954 masterpiece 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Now here's something even cooler: Japanese scientists have taken the first-ever photos of a real-live giant squid in the wild. Previously, the only evidence we had that these things even existed was an occasional corpse washing ashore, so seeing a living one is truly remarkable.

From the linked article:

The animal — which measures roughly 25 feet (8 meters) long — was photographed 2,950 feet (900 meters) beneath the North Pacific Ocean. [The] scientists attracted the squid toward cameras attached to a baited fishing line.

The most striking of these images are here and here. Simply fascinating...

How Civilizations End

I used to think, back in the dark old days of the Reagan era, that human civilization would most likely end in an instant of nuclear fire, one brief flash of horrible beauty and destruction followed by eternal silence and ashes. After this morning's commute, however, I've decided the end is going to come more slowly and far less spectacularly, in a prolonged struggle without end that fools us all into thinking we're making progress and moving ahead, when in reality we're just creeping our lives away inch by inch as we all slowly go mad.

I've decided, in other words, that humanity's end will come in one colossal traffic jam.

I can see it all now... future archeologists from an alien civilization pondering the bizarre death rituals that would require each individual to be wrapped in a sarcaphogus of steel and plastic and placed on a long ribbon of concrete running between our cities. Would they assume we wanted to keep our dead near us, above ground and in plain sight? Would they assume we shared some mythological vision of the dead travelling onward to our final destination? Perhaps the other seats within these sarcaphogi were intended for symbolic passengers, or beings that we thought we'd pick up along the way. The scraps and crumbs littering the floor and control surfaces of the sarcophagi would surely be interpreted as symbolic meals to feed the travelers on their journey into the afterlife, while the various electronic devices plugged into the mummified ears of the deceased were perhaps intended to provide a way for the living to speak to the dead. I suspect these future scientists from another world will shake their heads at the sad superstitions that left we foolish humans so isolated, so wedded to the idea of perpetual motion despite the ironic fact that we really weren't getting anywhere at all.

Yes, I can see it all... and I think I'm going to take the train to work the rest of this week.

Stick It To The Thought Police -- Read a Banned Book

It's the American Library Association's Banned Books Week, during which we remember the immortal words of Dr. Henry Jones, Sr., as portrayed by the immortal Sean Connery:

"...gooshe-shtepping morons should try reading booksh inshtead of barning them!"

"Barning" is, of course, Scottish for "burning."

I don't know about you, but I find the very notion of banning books deeply offensive. I resent well-meaning busybodies taking it upon themselves to tell me what's good for me or my children, if I had any. I resent authority figures that would presume to tell me or my hypothetical children what we should think. I resent the implication so often made by the self-appointed forces of morality and/or political correctness that reading something -- or viewing something or listening to something -- that they dislike somehow makes me a sinner. Mostly I resent the fact that the books that most often come under fire from Those Who Would Protect Us From Ourselves are so frequently the ones that have the most value, to me personally as well as to society in general. Of course, there are also plenty of cases in which the targeted text is utterly innocuous and the whole thing leaves me scratching my head and wondering what anyone could find wrong with that. Case in point: Where's Waldo?, which appears on the ALA's list of the top 100 most frequently challenged books of 1990-2001. Where's Waldo? And they say Trekkies need to get a life.

If you, like me, shudder at the thought of somebody like Ned Flanders -- or Pat Robertson, if you're looking for a real boogeyman -- dictating what you can and cannot put into your brain, take a look at the ALA list. I'll reproduce it below the fold, so just click on through. If you're like me, you'll recognize a lot of these titles from your childhood and young adulthood. Think about those books and ponder what they may have meant to you, even if they meant nothing more than a good read or something you were exposed to in one of your English classes. Let yourself get pissed off at the foolishness of trying to keep a book like S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders out of the hands of the kids who most need to read something like that, to have it speak to them and assure them that someone out there understands what they're feeling and thinking, that they're not freaks. Then select one of these horrible, evil, sinful titles that you haven't read and pick it up from the library or bookstore in the next five days. Read it proudly, in public. Maybe one of those goose-stepping morons will dare to say something to you about it, and you'll get the chance to do your Connery impression...

The 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–20001

1. Scary Stories (Series) by Alvin Schwartz
2. Daddy’s Roommate by Michael Willhoite
3. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
4. The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
6. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
7. Harry Potter (Series) by J.K. Rowling
8. Forever by Judy Blume
9. Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
10. Alice (Series) by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
11. Heather Has Two Mommies by Leslea Newman
12. My Brother Sam is Dead by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier
13. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
14. The Giver by Lois Lowry
15. It’s Perfectly Normal by Robie Harris
16. Goosebumps (Series) by R.L. Stine
17. A Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Newton Peck
18. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
19. Sex by Madonna
20. Earth’s Children (Series) by Jean M. Auel
21. The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson
22. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
23. Go Ask Alice by Anonymous
24. Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers
25. In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
26. The Stupids (Series) by Harry Allard
27. The Witches by Roald Dahl
28. The New Joy of Gay Sex by Charles Silverstein
29. Anastasia Krupnik (Series) by Lois Lowry
30. The Goats by Brock Cole
31. Kaffir Boy by Mark Mathabane
32. Blubber by Judy Blume
33. Killing Mr. Griffin by Lois Duncan
34. Halloween ABC by Eve Merriam
35. We All Fall Down by Robert Cormier
36. Final Exit by Derek Humphry
37. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
38. Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
39. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
40. What’s Happening to my Body? Book for Girls: A Growing-Up Guide for Parents & Daughters by Lynda Madaras
41. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
42. Beloved by Toni Morrison
43. The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton
44. The Pigman by Paul Zindel
45. Bumps in the Night by Harry Allard
46. Deenie by Judy Blume
47. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
48. Annie on my Mind by Nancy Garden
49. The Boy Who Lost His Face by Louis Sachar
50. Cross Your Fingers, Spit in Your Hat by Alvin Schwartz
51. A Light in the Attic by Shel Silverstein
52. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
53. Sleeping Beauty Trilogy by A.N. Roquelaure (Anne Rice)
54. Asking About Sex and Growing Up by Joanna Cole
55. Cujo by Stephen King
56. James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
57. The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell
58. Boys and Sex by Wardell Pomeroy
59. Ordinary People by Judith Guest
60. American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
61. What’s Happening to my Body? Book for Boys: A Growing-Up Guide for Parents & Sons by Lynda Madaras
62. Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
63. Crazy Lady by Jane Conly
64. Athletic Shorts by Chris Crutcher
65. Fade by Robert Cormier
66. Guess What? by Mem Fox
67. The House of Spirits by Isabel Allende
68. The Face on the Milk Carton by Caroline Cooney
69. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
70. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
71. Native Son by Richard Wright
72. Women on Top: How Real Life Has Changed Women’s Fantasies by Nancy Friday
73. Curses, Hexes and Spells by Daniel Cohen
74. Jack by A.M. Homes
75. Bless Me, Ultima by Rudolfo A. Anaya
76. Where Did I Come From? by Peter Mayle
77. Carrie by Stephen King
78. Tiger Eyes by Judy Blume
79. On My Honor by Marion Dane Bauer
80. Arizona Kid by Ron Koertge
81. Family Secrets by Norma Klein
82. Mommy Laid An Egg by Babette Cole
83. The Dead Zone by Stephen King
84. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
85. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
86. Always Running by Luis Rodriguez
87. Private Parts by Howard Stern
88. Where’s Waldo? by Martin Hanford
89. Summer of My German Soldier by Bette Greene
90. Little Black Sambo by Helen Bannerman
91. Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
92. Running Loose by Chris Crutcher
93. Sex Education by Jenny Davis
94. The Drowning of Stephen Jones by Bette Greene
95. Girls and Sex by Wardell Pomeroy
96. How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell
97. View from the Cherry Tree by Willo Davis Roberts
98. The Headless Cupid by Zilpha Keatley Snyder
99. The Terrorist by Caroline Cooney
100. Jump Ship to Freedom by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier

For those who may be interested in how you'd even go about compiling a top 100 list, here's the disclaimer from the ALA that came with the list:

[These are the Top 100] out of 6,364 challenges reported to or recorded by the Office for Intellectual Freedom, as compiled by the Office for Intellectual Freedom, American Library Association. The ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom does not claim comprehensiveness in recording challenges. Research suggests that for each challenge reported there are as many as four or five which go unreported.

And on that happy note, I bid you good evening, and good reading...

Vader Has A Thing For Japanese Schoolgirls? Who Knew?

If you enjoyed yesterday's lighthearted peek into the personal lives of your favorite Star Wars heroes, then you're going to love today's head-first dive into the dank underbelly of vaguely creepy foreign marketing materials:

I mean, come on... do you really think the Dark Lord of the Sith is all that interested in text messaging?

Chewie Cops A Feel

I thought I'd seen pretty much every photo there is relating to the original Star Wars trilogy. However, it appears that the Lucasfilm Archive may contain mysteries than even I, in my fanboy arrogance, have never imagined. Behold this image, brought to my attention by the wonderful folks at Boing Boing:

Is it real or is it Photoshopped? I have no idea, but to my eye it looks like it could be real. I have seen other Empire-era publicity stills taken in front of this same backdrop. Besides, I've always suspected there was something going on between Leia and the Wook. That whole "walking carpet" thing? Tell me you didn't detect the sexual tension boiling underneath that remark...

Javi's Night at the Emmys

Ever wonder what it's like to be win an Emmy Award for a television series you helped create? Javier Grillo-Marxuach, supervising producer for Lost, describes his big moment like this:

now i’m on stage. my thoughts – what am i talking about – what thoughts? my brain is like a hamster on red bull and meth. here is a sample of my brain activity during any given nanosecond and at the same time i was up there:

i wouldn’t be here if upn hadn’t cancelled “jake 2.0” in the middle of its run! thank you tyra banks for doing twice our first run number on a rerun of “america’s next top model” how is my wife going to find me after this? I AM HERE FOR THE GLORY OF QU’ONOS! do i get my own trophy? god, i love monkeys. the castaways should find a monkey and train it to be their butler. wolverine! SNCKT! monkey butler. chips would be nice. never be ru-uude to an arab! hey – that’s jj abrams! volare! whoa-oh! cantare! i remember a small band of three men i saw while vacationing in the island of bequia, they sang badly and their instruments were out of tune – but they had HEART! shatner was just here! shatner. the captain. hmmm. some dip would be nice with those chips. hey guinan? where’s the rest of the el-aurian refugees? I AM HE AND YOU ARE HE AND HE IS WE AND WE ARE ALL TOGETHER!

there is a little known fact that if you stay within three feet of the microphone during the emmy acceptance speech, you are in the tv zone and will be seen by the folks at home. since my parents were watching and admonished me to be visible, i planted myself in the safe zone and stayed there until guinan and wolverine ushered us out.

then it gets weird...

Weird indeed. There's a lot of geekiness in that excerpt, so here's a little help for the Muggles out there: when Javi refers to Guinan and Wolverine, he really means Whoopi Goldberg and Hugh Jackman, who played Guinan on Star Trek: The Next Generation and Logan/Wolverine in the X-Men movies, respectively. They were the presenters for this particular award. In Star Trek lore, Qu'onos (pronounced Kronos) is the Klingon homeworld, while "SNCKT" is how captions in the X-Men comics describe the sound of Wolverine's adamantium claws springing out of his hands. I leave it to you to figure out the miscellaneous song references.

If you're interested, the rest of Javi's experience at the Emmys is described in two massive (but highly entertaining) entries on his LiveJournal. Part One is here, and Part Two is here.

Happy Thursday!

Sartre Was an Optimist

A few days ago, the Significant Other and myself saw the new movie Lord of War, a thought-provoking drama about the world of illicit arms trading (that's gunrunning, for you folks who favor more direct language). Through the experience of seeing this movie, we learned two very important things, neither of which has much to do with gunrunning.

The first is that Sean Means, the Salt Lake Tribune film critic who called this well-made, intelligent movie "morally bankrupt" before giving it a rating of "no stars" -- a worse rating than he gave The Dukes of Hazzard, by the way -- is an idiot.

And the second thing we learned is that most of the other people sharing the theater with us were idiots, too.

Take, for example, the parents of the eight-year-old girl who was seated directly behind me. Yes, that's right, a couple of supposed grown-ups apparently thought that a R-rated film about an amoral, coke-snorting arms dealer and the genuinely reprehensible people who buy his wares -- a film that includes, among other things, a close-up of a man's liquified brains dripping off a broken window -- was appropriate viewing for their third-grader. Now, I'm not one of those prudish, "think of the children" types who believes that kids should be shielded from any entertainment stronger than an episode of ALF. My own parents took me to my first R-rated movie when I was about ten or eleven (the Richard Pryor-Gene Wilder comedy Stir Crazy, as I recall), and I turned out just fine. However, I do believe that there are (and should continue to be) movies that are clearly not intended for a young audience. Partly, it's because these movies often include imagery that young ones might find hard to take (like, say, a man's brains dripping off a window), but even more important is the fact that grown-up movies often deal with subject matter that is of no interest to children, or that is simply beyond their experience and ability to process. That eight-year-old behind me was bored out of her skull by Lord of War, as evidenced by the way she kept kicking the back of my seat until I was forced to go all gruff and ogre-y on her. Her two older sisters, who looked to be in their early teens, weren't grooving on it, either, judging from the heavy sighs that kept issuing from their direction. The only things in the movie they seemed to approve of were small children and a pair of hyenas that menace Nicholas Cage at one point, all of which earned an approving, "Oh, cuuu-ute."

I will give their parents a degree of credit for thinking to go ask the theater manager if they could swap movies -- I heard them debating over whether this was possible before they went to ask -- but when the answer presumably came back in the negative, they made the worst possible decision and continued to watch Lord of War anyway, white-knuckling it all the way to the miserable end. Me, I would've asked for my money back, taken the kids to something they actually wanted to see, and then, if I wanted to finish Lord of War, come back later sans children. Or, if no refund was possible, I would've simply eaten the cost of the tickets and gone home, rather than continuing to subject my kids to an inappropriate movie and my fellow audience members to their boredom. But then, I like to think that I am not an idiot.

If the irresponsible parents behind me weren't bad enough, I had a teenage boy in front of me who earned his idiot's badge by text-messaging throughout the last hour of the film without bothering to cover his cell phone's brightly glowing screen. Plenty of others have documented the havoc wreaked upon our society by the ubiquitous cell phone, so I won't go on about this too much, other than to note that whatever these phones use to back-light their screens is amazing stuff. This kid's tiny little flip-phone was generating enough glare to wash out the image thrown by the movie projector, an impressive -- if incredibly annoying -- feat of micro-engineering. If it was up to me, I'd deal with this sort of nonsense by installing jamming devices in all cinemas, live theaters, and concert halls. I hear this is already happening in some countries.

Finally, I never will understand some people's senses of humor. Lord of War is being advertised as somewhat of a comedy, and it certainly contains plenty of intentional humor -- I myself was greatly amused by a timelapse sequence of African villagers dismantling an abandoned airplane -- but there was a lot more laughing going on in the theater than I thought this film warranted. And it wasn't the "Oh my God, this movie is bad" style of laughter, either. It was, "Gee, that's really funny how a man behaves when he's hit rock-bottom in his moral and spiritual crisis." It was also, "Gee, that's really funny how that man's body jerks and twists as he's being machine-gunned." It can only be explained as more idiocy.

Anne thinks I misread the situation, that this inappropriate laughter was actually the nervous chuckle you sometimes hear when people are confronted with something that's a little too harsh to immediately process, but I'm not so sure. It reminded me too much of the debate I used to have with fans of the movie Pulp Fiction, who seemed utterly baffled that I didn't think the scene where a guy gets his head blown off by accident in the back seat of Sam Jackson's car was the funniest thing ever put on film. I thought then and I think now that we have a big problem in this country when it comes to the portrayal of violence in our popular entertainments. I'm not at all opposed to it, and I don't even think it always needs to be shown in a Serious-with-a-capital-S manner. But it is troubling to me that so many people find it laughable when someone's head explodes on-screen. It's not funny. I can't conceive of any set-up, circumstance or plot development in a live-action film when this might be funny. (Cartoons are another matter, given their general disregard of the laws of nature.) And every time I'm in a room full of people who apparently find such things funny, well, it makes me uncomfortable. Because I don't know what it says about those people that they find carnage funny, or about myself that I don't. But that's perhaps something to ponder another time.

Smart-alecky T-shirts

This afternoon, I saw the following printed on a fat guy's chest at the local amusement park:

I got this shirt for my girlfriend.
Best trade I ever made.

This amused me more than most of the things in the park. Just for fun, here's another one:

Be different.
Say yes.

Friday Quiz Time

This morning my friend Jen posted up the results of one of those automated Internet quizzes. This one is supposed to tell you about the meaning of your birthday, and, given that yesterday was my birthday, I thought it would be fun to give it a whirl. Here are my results:

Your Birthdate: September 15

With a birthday on the 15th of any month, you are apt to have really strong attachments to home, family and domestic scene. The 1 and 5 equaling 6, provide the sort of energy that makes you an excellent parent or teacher. You are very responsible and capable. This is an attractive and an attracting influence. You like harmony in your environment and strive to maintain it. You tend to learn by observation rather than study and research. You may like to cook, but you probably don't follow recipes. This number shows artistic leanings and would certainly support an talents that may be otherwise in your makeup. You're a very generous and giving person, but perhaps a bit stubborn in ways.

I have to admit, this description does sound quite a bit like me... but then I think this sort of thing is usually rendered in such broad, generalized terms that it's easy to see ourselves in the results. Just for kicks, here's another one from the same Web site that also comes pretty close to the bone:

You are a Self-Discoverer

You're not religious, but you've created your own kind of spirituality. Introspective and thoughtful, you tend to look inward for the divine. You are distrusting of all forms of organized religion. You especially dislike religious gurus and leaders, who you feel are charlatans.

Getting a Life

Anne and I have been e-mailing this afternoon about the previous entry -- what I was trying to say, what she thinks I actually did say, that sort of thing -- and we just had an exchange that you folks out there might find amusing, especially if you've ever known a genuine, stereotypical geek:

ME: The thing that shocked me [about the experience at the comic-book shop] was more that I just didn't want to talk about [Star Wars]. I didn't want to defend my preferences for the umpteenth time. I found myself looking at this kid and thinking what all geeks hate to hear... Get a life.

ANNE: oh no! Not the dreaded "get a life". :)

ME: Yes... that soul-crushing, ego-destroying weapon-of-last-resort employed by the practical and small-minded, the plebes and drudges who just don't see how damned important it is that Adm. Kirk's insignia changed from the left side of his uniform to the right side during beaming, and that it couldn't have been anything as simple as a continuity error, there MUST be some "in-universe" explanation for it...

Every once in a while, I feel like I get lucky and manage to really nail a concept or an experience in words. This is one of those times...

Weary of the Fight

Responding to a sudden whim this afternoon, I walked over to Night Flight Comics on my lunch hour. It's been a while since I've hung out at a comic shop, longer, perhaps, than I'd realized. Browsing the new issues, knowing that I'd be coming into the middle of all those stories with no idea of what was happening, seeing new titles I didn't recognize at all -- not to mention how damn young the store's employees seemed relative to myself -- it all made me feel something like a college student who has returned to his old high school for one last, sentimental look around. It hasn't been that long ago that this place was home, but it's been just long enough. Things are different now.

I ultimately selected a book I've had my eye on for a couple of years, a nifty trade paperback collection of the '70s-vintage Star Wars comics that I loved as a child. When I laid it on the counter along with my debit card, the shaggy-haired clerk in the Green Lantern shirt noticed the familiar logo and asked a sadly predictable question: "What did you think of Episode III?"

I had to hold my breath to keep from sighing. I wasn't in the mood to have this debate, not today, not again.

I gave the guy a fairly evasive answer, something about how I didn't think it was fair to compare the prequels and the originals because they were so different in tone and style.

Now, if you've never spent much time around hard-core geeks, I should probably explain that there is nothing they like better than arguing over stuff, preferably silly, pointless stuff, like whether Buffy the Vampire Slayer could defeat Bishop, the android from Aliens, in a fair fight. In light of this knowledge, you'll understand that my lame non-response about Revenge of the Sith wasn't enough to satisfy the Night Flight clerk.

"I thought it was okay," he said. "Now Episode I... that one had problems."

Uh-huh. Like I haven't been hearing that from, oh, everybody for the last six years.

"It had its moments," the clerk continued. "I liked the expanded Jedi Order. And the duel. But the acting was just awful."

Another amateur critic piling on the performances. How tiresome, I thought. I didn't say it, though. I said, "Well, the originals weren't exactly lessons in the thespian arts, either." (I don't entirely believe that -- the truth is, I have no complaints with any of the performances in the original three films, not even Mark Hamill's supposed whininess -- but it's easier to just give these guys a little of what they want.)

"Oh, yeah," my new-found buddy said, "the original films. Number four really hasn't held up very well at all, you know."

"You mean the first one?" I countered.

"Right, Episode IV."

I suppressed another sigh. Kids these days and their goofy numbering systems. But he was still talking.

"It's so campy and cheesy compared to the others..."

"That's not true," I said. "You can argue that it's different in tone from the others, more of a self-contained adventure and a lot less self-important, but I wouldn't call it campy."

God help me... I was getting sucked in. I didn't want to fight, I really didn't. I've argued every conceivable aspect of the Star Wars series a thousand times before, against better opponents than this kid. But my sentimental favorite of the series had been insulted. I spoke reflexively, before I could remind myself that I didn't want to get into this conversation. Again.

"The fact is, you've got to remember when that first film was made. It's thirty years old..."

"Uh-huh," the clerk replied. "But all six of them are the same story. It's a saga. They're supposed to fit together, and they don't. Episode IV is too stand-alone."

"That's because all this stuff about George having a big nine-part outline before he even started shooting is bogus. Star Wars was left open-ended in case it made any money and they wanted to do a sequel, but I don't believe they ever really intended to do it until the first one became so huge."

"Well, what about Vader surviving? It's too far-fetched to believe that he could've made it to another star system in that short-range fighter..."

Suddenly I had that feeling again. That sense that I was out of my element, that I've moved beyond this stuff. It's a feeling I've had for much of the summer, basically since the night I saw ROTS and liked it, and didn't much care if everyone else hated it. The feeling is somewhat similar to loss, but it's not as painful as that. It's more like what you experience when you finish a particularly moving book and you're just starting to disengage from it as you gently, reverently, place it back on the shelf. It's a sense of completion, of being ready to move on to whatever comes next.

I'm not saying my thirty-year love affair with all things Star Wars is finished -- why would I have bought that book today if it was? -- but I think maybe I am finished with a certain kind of Star Wars fandom. I'm tired of bickering about which episode is the worst of the series, whether Jar-Jar Binks is the anti-Christ, whether a Star Destroyer could take down the Starship Enterprise (it could, by the way, even the Galaxy-class Enterprise-D).

Maybe I'm done with fandom in general, at least as fandom commonly defines itself. I just don't have the patience anymore for the kind of sneering, fantasy-world, conflict-for-the-sake-conflict debates that rage throughout the fanboy community. I used to. I used to be a lot like that Night Flight clerk, a guy who lived for opportunities to validate his own opinions about nothing at all. To grapple with others over the minutiae of places and things that don't even exist. I was defiantly esorteric in my knowledge, delighted by my grasp of trivia. I used to have an opinion about everything pop cultural, and if others didn't share that opinion, well, then, they were obviously fools and it was my moral obligation to put them in their place.

But like I said, things are different now. I've lost my taste for the fight, at least the fight over inconsequential things like movies and TV shows. I've accepted (for the most part) that I like what I like, and that what I like is often considered irrelevant by the young, the hip, and the serious-minded. So be it. I've decided that pop culture, when you come right down to it, means nothing more or less than whatever individuals decide it means to them personally. Arguing about it accomplishes nothing. And this afternoon, I couldn't wait to finish my transaction and get the hell away from that argument.

It's strange, this realization that I no longer want to hang around comic shops arguing over nonsense. Could it be that I'm finally growing up?

Tigger Immortal

My buddy Jack sent me a cute little cartoon this morning, which I've decided to share with all you folks out there in InternetLand (hey, it's a Quick 'n' Dirty™ way to get an entry up):

Personally, I think this is pretty funny, but then I'm in on the joke. If you don't get it, go rent yourself a copy of the movie Highlander. I would explain it for you myself, but I don't have that kind of time right now...

Too Busy to Blog!

Argggghhhh!!!!

That's the sound of a blogger who is denied the time to blog. I've been accumulating lots of interesting links and topics for discussion, and it's driving me crazy that I haven't been able to do anything with them because work and Real Life have been so hectic. But have no fear, my loyal readers -- I will return. Hopefully sooner than later.

Geeky Politics

Bumpersticker spotted Sunday afternoon in a Costco parking lot and presented here without further comment:

The Best Damn Gatorade We've Ever Had

Last Sunday afternoon, on the spur of the moment, Anne and I decided to drive up Little Cottonwood Canyon.

We were both in a funk, me because of the things I wrote about a week ago, Anne for reasons of her own that I wouldn't presume to make public here. We each craved a break from our usual routine as well as some reassurance that the whole damn planet really hadn't spiralled off its axis, or plunged into an parallel dimension where everything looks the same but somehow just sucks. We wanted sanity and peace. We needed sunshine and fresh air and solitude. The solution was obvious, high gas prices be damned, and within minutes we had the top down on my Mustang and we were motoring eastward, toward the mountains and away from the hateful 'burbs.

For those who might not know, Little Cottonwood is one of a dozen or so drivable canyons within easy reach of the Salt Lake area. Each of them has its own attractions, personality and terrain; Little Cottonwood Canyon is my favorite of them. It's not as steep or as winding as its cousin to the north, Big Cottonwood, but it is more narrow; in many places, the canyon is little more than a deep, V-shaped cleft between two granite walls. A two-lane road runs up the floor of this cleft, right alongside a natural creek that is fed by high mountain snowpacks. The cliff-sides are thickly forested, at least by Utah standards, and the tapestry of trees gradually morphs from scrub oak to quaking aspen to Douglas fir as you climb higher.

I used to spend a lot of time up this canyon. It's always been a good place to get out of the summer heat, to take a date for a picnic, or to go on days when a darkened cinema doesn't offer a sufficient amount of escape. I even had a specific place in the canyon where I used to go and brood, back when I was still young enough to think that sitting on a rock and wallowing in angst was romantic instead of vaguely pathetic. "My Spot," as I always thought of it, is by the creek, beneath the level of the road and sheltered enough that on most days you can perch on a tumbled boulder, with the rushing water at your feet to block the highway sounds and a screen of trees around you to camoflage the passing traffic, and feel blissfully alone in the world.

This wasn't one of those days, however. The turn-out nearest to "My Spot" was jammed with parked cars, and I imagined the creek was probably full of guys in hip-waders and lure-bedecked hats. I drove on, climbing ever higher, past the Snowbird ski resort, where Utah's own version of Oktoberfest was in full-swing. (Yes, Virginia, it's true; you can find alpenhorns, oompah bands, and men in lederhosen here in the mountains of Utah. But unlike the original Oktoberfest in freewheeling Munich, here you have to drink your lager behind velvet ropes that segregate the beer tent from the kiddie face-painting booths. Such is life in Utah.)

While Oktoberfest does have its charms, I had a more sedate destination in mind: the town of Alta, year-round population slightly under 400, elevation slightly over 8500 feet. It's an ancient mining village and one of the oldest ski resorts in the country. Unlike the sprawling Snowbird complex just below it, however, Alta has so far resisted large-scale development (as well as, controversially, the presence of snowboarders) and so it retains a quaint, small-town feeling. In other words, there's not much there in the way of buildings, and in the summertime there's virtually no activity, either, aside from a few hikers bound for the Albion Basin and Catharine Pass at the very top of the canyon.

The air was crisp up there, if a bit thin, and the sun seemed closer to the earth. Once I parked the car and shut off the engine, the only sounds we heard were a whisper of wind, a bird's call, and the crazy, pinwheel whirring of a mountain-bike as it streaked down-canyon at suicidal speeds. Looking back the way we'd come, we could see a wedge-shaped slice of the Salt Lake Valley, hazy and indistinct at the bottom of the world. This was exactly what Anne and I needed to soothe our souls.

Unfortunately, we hadn't thought much about our other needs when we left the house. Driving with the top down on a sunny day in Utah's dry climate tends to suck the moisture right out of you, and we'd neglected to bring any kind of liquid with us. There were a couple of restaurants open along Alta's main (only) street, but we doubted these places would provide anything to drink without us buying a meal, and we were still digesting a rather large brunch. There was, of course, nothing resembling a Kwik-E-Mart in sight. But there was a gift shop right across the road from where I was parked, an unassuming little place called The Photohaus, tucked under the protective overhang of a looming, multi-story house. A hand-painted sign out front announced the proprietor's wares: Alta-logo T-shirts, hats, film.

Perfect, I thought, a gift shop; surely a gift shop catering to stupid tourists like myself will have a cooler in the corner, stocked with soda and bottled water. All gift shops have those, don't they?

Anne didn't feel like exploring, so I ventured off by myself. The entrance to the shop opened into a kind of atrium (although that's too grandiose a word for a tiny, dark space built of old, weather-warped plywood), from which broad wooden steps led upwards to a homemade door. I was amused to see that this door was equipped with an old-fashioned metal pull-handle and a dangling hasp for a padlock. I tugged the door open, expecting to see a standard-issue, shopper-friendly emporium on the other side.

Instead, I found myself in a space even smaller than the "atrium," a mudroom, judging from the heap of shoes in the corner. A spiral staircase led even farther upwards, and I grimly trudged toward the sky, wondering just what kind of a bizarro place I'd stumbled into.

At the top of the stairs was a landing; directly ahead was a set of sliding, patio-style doors that led out onto a balcony with a sweeping view of the ski runs. Turning away from the view, I saw a door in either corner of the landing, and then the gift shop itself, which was little more than a cubbyhole on the other side of the staircase, stacked floor-to-ceiling with boxes and shelves of not-so-neatly folded clothes. A cash register was partially hidden beneath a carelessly tossed "Ski Alta" fleece. I thought the whole place had a haphazard, amateurish air about it. Then it dawned on me: The Photohaus isn't beneath the house; it's in the house.

I was standing in someone's home business.

That someone emerged through one of the doors as I stood there, wondering what to do next: a tall, gray-haired fellow dressed in chinos, a plaid shirt, and Merrell Jungle Mocs, a type of shoe I always associate with outdoorsy types. He hadn't shaved in several days, and he was blinking as if I'd woken him from a nap. He smiled broadly enough, though. I said hello and asked him if he had any bottled water for sale.

"You're trying to buy water at a t-shirt shop?" he asked.

"Well, there's not many other businesses up here, and I figured you might have a cooler or something. I drove up from the valley with my girl and we didn't think to bring anything to drink..." I replied, feeling incredibly ignorant.

He nodded, and said, "Let me see what I can find." He exited through the door on the other side of the landing. He was gone a long time, long enough that I started wondering if I shouldn't just leave with some shred of my dignity still intact. Just before I bolted down the stairs, however, he returned with two small bottles of lemon-lime flavor Gatorade. He held them out to me.

I knew immediately that these bottles had come from this guy's personal stock. He'd gone into his own kitchen to see what he could find for a foolish city slicker who come up the canyon unprepared.

"You don't have to sell me your own stuff," I said, worried that I might offend him but more embarassed about the circumstances.

"Don't be silly," the guy said. "They're yours if you want them."

I licked my lips, which suddenly felt like sheets of printer paper dangling from the front of my face, and asked how much I owed him. He sold them to me for only a dollar a piece, more, I think, to get me to take them than anything. I gratefully pulled a couple of singles from my wallet. After the transaction, I shook the guy's hand, thanked him and told him I'd be back sometime, and went back downstairs to Anne.

"Gatorade?" she said when I showed her what I'd brought. I knew she would've rather had water, so I quickly explained to her what had happened. When I finished, she said, "You're kidding. The guy took these out of his own fridge?"

I nodded.

She immediately took one of the bottles and cracked it open. I did the same, and we both drank in long gulps. After, as we drove back down the canyon, Anne remarked that that had been the best damn Gatorade she'd ever had, and I couldn't disagree. We'd gone looking for some reassurance that whole world didn't suck. I think we found it in the kindness of a grizzled ski-bum who runs a t-shirt shop out of his own home in a tiny little community on top of a mountain.

I also think I should've bought a t-shirt from him...

Donate at Harmon's

If you happen to live along the Wastach Front and you'd like to donate some cash to help the victims of Katrina, might I suggest you do it at a Harmon's grocery store? You ought to be shopping at Harmon's anyway, because they're the local guys and they provide the excellent service you don't get from SuperWalMart (and you don't need a privacy-invading Big Brother card to get the good prices, either, like you do at Smith's). But even if you've never set foot in one of their stores, it's worth paying them a special visit now, because they're matching every dollar you donate to the Red Cross for hurricane relief. That means if you donate the money at Harmon's that you were going to give anyway -- and you know you were going to give, right? -- you'll effectively double the size of your donation.

I gave some last night. Not much, just what I had in my wallet. But it was money I just would've blown on DVDs anyway, and getting some help to a family that's lost everything is much better than owning the first season of Hogan's Heroes. Go to Harmon's and donate now, as a favor to me, before you get busy with your holiday weekend and forget...

Overwhelmed, and Craving the Peace of 1985

Yesterday, John Scalzi wrote in his AOL Journal about the difficulty of being expected to produce what he calls a "variety show" -- meaning lots of entries about many different and mostly lightweight subjects -- while Something Big is going down in the world:

...it's causing me some real cognitive dissonance to have an entry [about] the complete horror of what's developing in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, and an entry about cats in a sink, right next to each other. I'm feeling mildly guilty about talking about cats in a sink at all.

I'm experiencing much the same kind of angst myself, actually. I've been looking at my last couple of published entries and thinking about the topics I'm planning to write about in upcoming ones, and suddenly I feel like I've got some really screwed-up priorities, like I'm a modern-day Marie Antoinette or something. Huge numbers of people are dying pathetic deaths right here in our own country and I'm writing about fake zombies and space movies, for god's sake. It's frivolous, isn't it? A sign of a superficial personality? Do I have a responsibility to use my abilities and my little public forum here to acknowledge what's happening? Am I being disrespectful to the victims of Katrina if I don't?

Maybe I'm overthinking this and taking on burdens that aren't mine to carry -- it wouldn't be the first time -- but I keep thinking that someone who didn't know me might suspect from this blog that I'm one of those artificially constructed, emotionally stunted replicants in Blade Runner who are incapable of feeling empathy for other living creatures. It's not true. The fact is, I suffer from rather an excess of empathy. I find it all too easy to imagine myself in what's left of New Orleans, struggling to keep myself and my loved ones going for just one more hour, listening for the sounds of a chopper or a boat coming, finally, to pull us out of that wet hell and take us to safety, our throats tight from thirst even though we're surrounded by water too polluted to drink.

If you've guessed that I'm in something of a dark mood today, you're right. And it isn't just the hurricane that's bringing me down, either. I haven't written much lately about politics or current events, but that doesn't mean I haven't been paying attention to them. I'm not at all happy about what I've been seeing. This isn't the world I always thought I was going to live in when I grew up. It's not because I'm a basically a liberal and the hard-core conservatives are currently calling the shots, although that's part of it. It's not because the suburbs keep spreading like a cancer across the landscapes that I used to know, although that, too, has been bothering me again lately. It's not really any one particular issue; it's the whole, big, overwhelming ball of every issue you can think of, and it just starts with the hurricane.

Let's run down the list, shall we?

One of my dream cities has become an Atlantean wasteland filled with death and anarchy, no one seems able to do anything about it, and some jackasses have actually suggested we leave it that way.

Gasoline has hit three bucks a gallon here in Salt Lake, and I understand it's even higher in other places. I fully expect it to be higher before the end of Labor Day weekend, and the price will likely never go back down because it never does. There's a lot of talk in the blogosphere about "peak oil," the moment when we reach the maximum possible level of oil production, after which there will be an inevitable decline as the available supply quite literally dwindles away. I love my car, but I feel guilty everytime I drive it. And that's just my modern, semi-economical Mustang I'm talking about, not my beloved but gas-guzzling old Galaxie that hasn't moved all summer long. I've always loved the movie The Road Warrior, in part because it was such a far-fetched, over-the-top fantasy, but suddenly it doesn't seem all that implausible that people will one day be reduced to scavenging droplets of fuel from roadside wreckage.

With all the ports along the Gulf Coast shut down, we're going to start seeing the price of all sorts of consumer goods rising, which means the economy will very possibly tank out again just when it's starting to show some signs of life.

The war continues in Iraq, and Americans are dying -- according to the latest slogan -- for the concept of freedom, but Iraqis probably won't have much of that when their new constitution is finally finished. Well, women won't, at least. Sorry, girls.

Here at home, meanwhile, we've got terrorists in LA and polls indicate that a majority of Americans don't understand the fundamental wisdom of teaching science in the classroom and religion in Sunday school. Hell, I've even heard that a fifth of our population apparently thinks the sun goes around the Earth, something that was supposedly settled way back in the 1600s.

I could go on, but that's a pretty good sampling of what's getting under my skin lately. In addition, there've been some issues in my Real-World life that I'm not going to discuss here. Basically, it just feels to me like everything is coming apart, like the United States is this massive, steam-driven engine that's accelerated to such a pace that it's beginning to shake itself to pieces, and I don't know how we're ever going to stop feeling that way. It just seems like, as a society, we've spent decades making the wrong decisions, going for the easy answers and the short-term fixes, and now it's all coming back to bite us in our collective ass. Again, this isn't a partisan thing. The Democrats have been just as guilty of short-sightedness as the Republicans. But I don't see anybody willing to admit that and figure out a way to move on, and, I'll be honest, I'm really starting to worry about whether our country is going to survive much longer. Everywhere I look I see signs of decay. People can't even agree on what America is supposed to be about. Everyone has their own versions of history and morality, and those different visions don't correspond at all. And this scares me.

It's all too much. Too many problems without any solutions, too many bad feelings. I can take it for a while, but eventually I get to a place where I just can't process any more of it. And so I try to escape. I focus on movies and fantasies and the way things used to be, because I like them better than what's really in front of me.

If it was possible, I'd turn the clock back to 1985. In a heartbeat, I'd do it. I'd fly around the world at the speed of light and reverse-rotate us all back to the days when we wore leg-warmers and parachute pants (the original, pre-MC Hammer variety) and Members Only jackets, and we liked 'em. We used to worry back then that Reagan was going to push The Button, but it never felt like the world was a train flying off the trestle.

To boil it all down to the simplest phrase, I'm sick of this shit.

And on that cheery note, Happy Labor Day weekend, everybody.

Departure Angle on Viewer

We've seen it hundreds of times on TV and in the movies: an entire planet shrinking away from the camera, swallowed up by the darkness of space in a matter of seconds as the Enterprise warps out of orbit or the Millenium Falcon races away from pursuing TIE fighters. Ever wonder what it would really look like to watch our homeworld slide into the distance behind us? Then check out this movie, which is composed of several hundred images taken by the spacecraft Messenger during a "gravity assist manuever" that will slingshot the unmanned probe toward Mercury. The photos were made over the course of 24 hours, so we get to see a complete rotation of the planet during the film. This makes Earth look something like a toy top spinning at an unnatural, crazy speed, but it is a beautiful sight nonetheless. I was especially fascinated by the golden sun-highlight in the upper quadrant; that's something no special-effects guy has ever thought to add to his shot, at least not to my knowledge.

I still believe and hope that someday a human being will see this view with their own eyes instead of through a trick of technology...

Outage

Well, we're back on the air. As some of you may have noticed, Simple Tricks and Nonsense disappeared for a good part of yesterday. I've no idea what happened -- my best guess is that either my Webmaster Jack was handling some sort of crisis, or the Ugnaughts went on strike again. Treacherous little fiends...

Anyway, as far as I can tell, everything's functioning normally again. I'll be back later with a couple of entries, real-world job permitting...