EVERY ONCE IN AWHILE WILEY MILLER HITS A HOME RUN: Here. I generally like the continuing storyline part of Non Sequitur more than the actual non sequiturs (Danae might be the greatest descendant of Lucy Van Pelt on the current comics page) but this one is really good.

I HAD NO IDEA ADULT SWIM WAS DOING APPLE DAILY PARODIES: But indeed they are:



Via ESWN, who has a link to Apple Daily's coverage of the Fujian elementary stabbings that I cannot bring myself to watch.

SAY, REMEMBER WHEN READING SAYYID QUTB WAS THE THING TO DO?: Those heady days of late 2001? When our brows furrowed, and we wondered why they hated us? And we decided it was our prosperous lifestyles they hated (the jealous creeps), and not our ceaseless meddling in their internal affairs? Remember? Well, you're probably better off. Larison reminds me of that time indirectly, by noting such claims were always bogus.

ON THE ORIGINS OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM: The runaway star theory.

LATE TO THESE (COMICS EDITION): SEK and Erin Polgreen give form to my ill-thought out, but genuinely felt, dislike of Mark Millar.

EDIT: To add my quick summation of his work--he's an excellent and energetic self-promoter who doesn't have too much interesting to say within his chosen genre (the superhero) other than "Aren't these male power fantasies sort of silly? Here, let me show you how silly." And then he gets silly. But his power fantasies remain power fantasies, with maybe a dose of ironic distance thrown in. Any subversiveness you're detecting, you're probably in the main bringing it to the table yourself. But he's certainly found a niche! The creative ecosystem is vast, and has room for many, many types--may we all find our niches.

HAPPY PASSOVER: From a dude frequently mistaken for a member of the tribe, to the actual members of the tribe.

A SPIDER-MAN GAME? SCRIPTED BY DAN SLOTT?: Sign me up. With the caveat being the best possible Dan Slott-penned video game would involve Squirrel Girl versus every major villain and cosmic power in Earth-616. Because she's beaten them all you know. In continuity. It all really happened.

WHEN EVEN CAPTCHA IS PROVIDING COMMENTARY ON YOUR BASEBALL FRANCHISE: You've got problems. And I've already lost where I got this from!

REORGANIZING THE OLD COMICS COLLECTION: Used to want to just keep everything absolutely alphabetical, like in the good Mr Overstreet's annual volumes. But my collection is way out of hand and anyway I don't think storing things like that exactly encourages rereading--and why keep a collection if I'm not going to reread them? I am not, for the most part, a bags and boards collector, though times in the past I have been attracted to that style, to it's neatness and uniformity, I guess. But my passion for uniformity never lasts long. And besides it's a pain in the hinder to individually wrap all those comics and break out the little strip of Scotch tape. What I'm proposing is a variant on the bags-and-boards style, wherein I bag comics as a set when they contain a single storyline. Maybe even labeling the bags with the story title? Who knows! My anal-retentiveness can take many forms. But I doubt I'll go that far on a consistent basis. Alls I want is an orderly process to decide which comics to keep and which to ebay/yard sale/donate/recycle.

REALLY REALLY NOT HOPING FOR A DUKE/SPARTANS CHAMPIONSHIP GAME: After all the crazy upsets and all-around fun of this tournament it will be a gosh-darned shame to have it end up being Izzo versus Krzyzewski. Not that Huggins is a wonderful dude either, but at least this is new territory for him.

(Krzyzewski, by the way, is another word that Google cannot even attempt to find a correct spelling for.)

NEW (TO ME) BLOG OF THE DAY: Which is the same as The Auteurs' blog of the day of March the 29th: Star Wars Modern. A series of occasional posts (almost essay-length) of cultural criticism that finds ways to tie it all back to Star Wars. Neat stuff.

THE FIRST STEP IN BECOMING A MATURE MST3K FAN: Is admitting that not every movie they watched was bad. It's true! The narrative of the show demanded the characters act like every move they watched was sheer torture, but many of the films themselves were charming in a B-movie way, or just weird without being unappealing (like many of the European sword and sorcery movies, or Pod People.) There's at least one minor masterpiece in the MST3K filmography (Kitten With A Whip, a wonderful film noir with Ann-Margret doing maximum scene-chewing) and possibly two (depending on how you feel about Danger: Diabolik, which I know has its defenders; I am not sold on it.) There are many solid films in the show's history: Girls Town, Brute Man, Escape 2000, Bloodlust!, Night of the Blood Beast, This Island Earth. And many more that were more cheap and charming than outright bad. For instance I give you Crash of Moons, a movie cobbled together from old episodes of Rocky Johnson, Space Ranger (the whole episode, please watch at your leisure):



See? That's not exactly bad. It's low budget, but it's entertaining enough, and dramatically self-consistent. It knows it's a low-budget 1950s science fiction show and it tries to be the best low-budget 1950s science fiction show it can be. And Patsy Parsons is fantastic as the villainess Cleolanta. So how does one reconcile one's enjoyment of the film being watched on MST3K with one's enjoyment of the riffing on the film? Well--consider that if MST3K is about anything it is about enjoying watching bad movies. The narrative suggests bad movies are torture, but really, the spirit of the show is watching bad movies and enjoying them. The show was always two-faced about this, I think, insisting their movies were terrible at the same time they were genuinely enjoying much of what they watched. As a mature MST3K fan you have to be a little two-faced too, respecting the jokes and respecting the films at the same time. Not to say every film on MST3K deserves respect--The Castle of Fu Manchu, by international uber-hack Jess Franco, is genuinely terrible. You'll have to decide for yourself which episodes to watch on multiple levels, and which to wholeheartedly cheer on the cast as the lay into something terrible. The MST3K films were not all terrible, though, which is the point of this post.

One related function of MST3K has been as a preserver of culture that otherwise would be totally forgotten: Manos, Pod People, Mitchell, and especially the films of Coleman Francis--these would all be utterly obscure without MST3K. So a show about celebrating-yet-loathing trash has also acted as a trash museum (as well as a museum for pop culture of all kinds, my own cultural vocabulary has been greatly expanded by my MST3K fandom.)

ANYONE COMPLAINS ABOUT BUTLER HAVING AN UNFAIR HOMETOWN ADVANTAGE IN THE FINAL FOUR AND I WILL GIVE THEM SUCH A PINCH: Let's go Butler.

REVOLUTIONS IN MY APPROACH TO NEWSPAPER COMICS: My enjoyment of Darby Conley's Get Fuzzy has improved dramatically ever since I decided it was the newspaper equivalent of MST3K host segments. Laid back dude, his two wise-cracking and somewhat insane non-human buddies, using one location to tell most of the stories (Rob ventures outside once in awhile, I know)...I mean yeah. Think about it. Similar strain of humor too. Unsure whether I really needed to think of it as MST3K-like to really appreciate it, or if that was simply the comparison I made when Get Fuzzy started to click for me. A chicken or the egg question.

DEPARTMENT OF UNFORTUNATE HEADLINES: There had to be a better way to lead off a story about increasing cooperation between American and Mexican authorities than "Turning to the gringos for help," Economist. As a rational economic actor I let my subscription run out ages ago, by the by. Not that it isn't a great magazine! But it was sort of a luxury good and I was only reading half of it, if that, anyway.

THE VAST LEFT-WING ACORN CONSPIRACY: Right? Didn't they get Obama elected via thousands of fake voters? Or worse yet, voters who don't even own property? The dastards! Subverting our democracy at every opportunity. I thus cannot recommend Jesse Walker's even-handed analysis of the group's demise at all. And remember, kids, Jesse's a glibertarian. He writes for Reason! He has to be!

(Sarcasm tags applied in this parenthetical. In cyberspace, nobody can hear you be ironic.)

DONDEROOOOOO: Vs Dave Weigel here. Remember when the Hit & Run comments were fun? I miss that. Joe from lowell needs to unretire. Thoreau too.

FROM THE BLOGISTAN FEMINIST READER: Jill at Feministe's Dating While Feminist. Noted simply because I'm amazed that any male would think the right reaction to his date telling him she's an avowed feminist would be to say something like, "That's awesome! I love hellcats!" When I hear "hellcat" if I'm not thinking "Patsy Walker" I'm thinking "that sounds like something Zap Brannigan would say during his terminally unsuccessful courtship of Turanga Leela."

WANT TO BECOME A RIGHT-WING BOGEYWOMAN?: Write an article for The Nation in the 60s! Then wait decades for a Breitbart protege to show up at your apartment. It's just that easy. Via a Newshogger's Twitter.

"BEAUTIFUL STUPIDITY": Now that's the right phrase to use to sell me on Just Cause 2. Eidos should use it on the cover. "'Beautiful stupidity', raves Ars Technica!" Sounds like the greatest fun sandbox since Saints Row 2. And "beautiful stupidity" sounds like an apt descriptor of a lot of great games, actually.