We interrupt your regular programming for an important historical note: Today is the 75th anniversary of the end of Prohibition, the disastrous social experiment that did very little to curb the behavior it was designed to end, but did manage to make some very bad people very rich and powerful while bringing appalling levels of violence to the streets of American cities. (See also Drugs, War on.) As I’ve noted before, I find it endlessly amusing that my home state of Utah, home of the tee-totaling Mormons, was the one that cast the deciding vote in favor of repeal. (In a nice bit of historical symmetry, Utah was also the deciding vote in ratifying the Constitutional amendment that created Prohibition in the first place, so perhaps it was only fitting that we undid it as well.)

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I’ve been on quite a run of epic nerdiness lately — you’re very kind to say you hadn’t noticed, but please, we both know better — and I’m beginning to worry about alienating that segment of readers who don’t know an alluvial damper from a flux capacitor. Therefore, as a favor to all you non-fanboys and fangirls out there, I promise that none of the following links has anything whatsoever to do with Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, or any of the other shows whose titles I used to scribble on my notebook covers back in elementary and middle school…

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I was just reading an interview with Dan DiDio, an executive at DC Comics, and I thought the following remark (made in reference to the challenges comics people face with some of their long-running characters) tied in quite nicely to I was trying to say about remakes in the previous entry:

You have to remember, a lot of our fan base has been reading comics 20 or 30 years now. They’ve seen a lot of stories and a lot of things. We’re always trying to find a way to give them something new but also give them exactly what they want.

That’s the same challenge J.J. Abrams is facing, isn’t it? He’s got to do something new with Star Trek, but he’s also got to give us, well, Star Trek, or else he fails. I certainly wouldn’t want his job…

Hey, everyone… if you’re actually reading this on Thanksgiving (which I like to refer to as Mass Consumption Day), I can only assume it’s after you’ve all finished dinner, right? If not, shouldn’t you be off, um, consuming?

Anyhow, I just wanted to drop a quick little note here: In his column this week at amctv.com, the ubiquitous John Scalzi lists all the things for which he’s thankful in the realm of sci-fi movies. I agree with him on pretty much all of these items, except for the one about special effects (sorry, I’m a big fan of actual, tangible miniatures, although I concede the CG stuff is getting better all the time). I found one of Scalzi’s items especially resonant:

I’m thankful I’m almost 40 years old and still want a lightsaber and a speeder bike.

My geeky ego has taken quite a beating over the past ten years. From the Great Fanboy Prequel Wars that trashed the reputation of my favorite movie series and revealed one of my boyhood heroes to have feet of clay, to the remakes of damn near every movie or TV show I’ve ever loved, I’ve had to endure the diminishing, eclipsing, or outright dismissal of things that I used to think would never go away. Things that loom so large in my personal history and psyche that I’ve always assumed they must mean as much to everyone else as they mean to me. I know… naive, even childish. There have been times, especially lately with all the talk about the new Star Trek, when I’ve felt like a damn fool for clinging to my increasingly obsolete obsessions, when I’ve wondered what’s wrong with me that I apparently don’t see this stuff the same way everybody else does, i.e., as quaint old relics that were cool in their day but are now just silly and needing to be replaced. Not to put too melodramatic a spin on it, but these times of self-doubt have been genuinely painful.

But then something comes along like that video of the dueling sailors, and I feel that old familiar rush of endorphins and I realize that, yeah, I still love this stuff, in spite of what the rest of the world may think about it. Moreover, I’m glad that I still love this stuff, that the critics and cynics haven’t managed to entirely wipe out my enjoyment of it. I’m thankful indeed that somewhere deep down inside my wounded, stressed-out, overburdened, and all-too-often-exhausted grown-up mind, there is still a happy, carefree ten-year-old walking through his small, boring, rural town with a comic book rolled up in his back pocket, dreaming of slicing down trees with a real lightsaber or whipping through the fields in a vehicle that’s magically floating three feet above the ground. Sometimes, that kid still finds a way to speak to me, and sometimes I still find a way to be him. And surely that’s a good and even necessary thing…

Happy Thanksgiving, my friends.

Every few months, some researcher somewhere releases the results of a new survey or study that demonstrates yet again how astoundingly ignorant the average American is about, well, everything: science, history, politics, other countries, and especially our own country. I never quite know what to think about these surveys. On a good day, it seems impossible to me that my fellow citizens can be so stupid, that the surveys must be biased, or filled with poorly worded questions that lead the subjects too much. Then there are other days when my grumpy-old-mannish tendencies are ascendant and it’s all too easy to believe that we ‘muricans are a bunch of hopelessly myopic rubes obsessed with sex, celebrity, consumer goods, and religion (these days often coincide with elections, oddly enough).

Earlier this week, political blogger Kevin Drum made note of yet another one of these surveys, this one conducted annually by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, on which “fewer than a third of the 2,500 randomly selected test takers managed to score higher than 60%.” Kevin included a link to the test itself, so naturally I had to click on over there and experience for myself this brutally difficult thing that so few otherwise fully functional adults could manage to pass.

Not to brag or anything, but I scored 93%, based on correctly answering 31 out of 33 questions. And the two I missed were both “Doh! How could I get those wrong!” types of things.

Now, I honestly don’t consider my all that smart or well-informed, so I am utterly flabbergasted by all the results of this survey. And also more than a little scared. Especially terrifying is the chart of “additional findings,” which indicates that, as poorly as the average citizen did on this test, our elected officials — the ones who are running the country and thus, presumably, know a thing or two about it — did worse in most categories. For years, our society has been playing up the “ordinary joe-ness” of our politicians, voting for the guys we’d most like to have over for a barbecue, and sneering at intellectual “elites.” It looks like we’ve gotten what we’ve been asking for.

One more little serving of food for thought: the aforementioned Kevin points out that “[o]ther ISI findings, by the way, include these: the more education you have, the better you do; it doesn’t matter much what kind of university you went to, whether you go to church, or what your politics are; watching lots of TV is bad for your score; and reading lots of history is good for your score.” All of which ought to be obvious, I suppose…