Archives

Oct042005

Dang Clones

It’s a gray and drizzly day here in the SLC, and just about everyone I passed during my lunchtime constitutional looked as if they needed a good laugh. If you do, too, might I suggest John Scalzi’s General Notes on the Care and Feeding of Clones? It seems that having a clone of yourself is not the panacea you might think, since the clone won’t be any more good for anything than you yourself.

Note #10 pretty much sums it all up:

10. Eventually your clone will get the idea of cloning itself. You might think it’s a bad idea at first — everyone knows that a clone of clone is like a second generation photocopy, and it becomes slightly more smudged, and then next thing you know you’ve got a drooling idjit that looks like a mashup between you and the late Marty Feldman — but on the other hand, by the time your clone gets this idea, you’ll have realized that all your clone is good for is sitting on the couch and mocking you while it eats your food and tries to trick your wife into having sex with it. Doesn’t your clone deserve to be similarly afflicted? Sure it does. Be warned, however: Your clone’s clone will still want to sleep with your wife. They’re just that way.

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Oct032005

Movie Review: Serenity

Take my love, take my land
Take me where I cannot stand
I don’t care, I’m still free
You can’t take the sky from me
Take me out to the black
Tell them I ain’t comin’ back
Burn the land and boil the sea
You can’t take the sky from me
There’s no place I can be
Since I found Serenity
But you can’t take the sky from me…

 

–Opening theme from Firefly

Writer Joss Whedon reportedly pitched his television series Firefly as “the anti-Star Trek,” so it’s interesting to note that the show has followed a similar path as that classic series: unloved by network executives and cancelled before its time, Firefly, like Star Trek before it, spawned a fanatically loyal cult following that clamored for the show’s return, which it did this weekend in the form of a Whedon-directed feature film, Serenity. The difference between Firefly and Star Trek, however, is that Trek ran three seasons in its original incarnation; it held a sizable presence in the collective pop-cultural memory even before years of syndication made it into a household name. Firefly, by contrast, lasted a mere ten episodes before it was canned, and only 14 episodes were actually filmed.

Think about that. Most series that fail to run a complete season (usually 22 episodes these days) vanish without a trace, quickly forgotten by a fickle viewing public. But this show, which didn’t even make it half a season, somehow garnered enough attention after its death to come back on the Big Screen. Even if you don’t give a womp-rat’s exhaust port about cultish science-fiction media properties, that’s got to impress you because it’s so mind-bogglingly unlikely.

Continue Reading…

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Sep302005

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.

Continue Reading…

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Sep282005

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.]

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Sep282005

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…

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Sep282005

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 sarcophagus 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 traveling onward to our final destination? Perhaps the other seats within these sarcophagi 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.

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Sep272005

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…

Continue Reading…

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Sep272005

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:

The power to send photos wirelessly over your phone is insignificant compared to the Force.

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

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