AND TO COMPLETELY NOT GO IN THE DIRECTION OF THINKING ON THIS BLOG: We'll do a post full of rambling thoughts and links.

--Because Bill Simmons is back and rambling again.

--Although Mystery Science Theater 3000 was supposed to be about awful, awful movies, some of the stuff they showed was transcendently great because it was inexplicably bad. Of all the episodes I've seen--and I've seen nearly half of them, I'd say--the "stupid Mexican kids' movie" Santa Claus is a good example of something so weird it can't be bad, with the strange transposition of Santa, Satan and Merlin, all the It's A Small World kids making the toys, the mechanical reindeers, the "aggressively cute" Lupita, the puppet show, and so on. I can only imagine how doubly weird it was in the original Spanish. It should be in the Christmas movie pantheon at this point--it's not that much weirder than, say, Year Without A Santa Claus. And Once Upon A Honeymoon--a musical short for the phone company that never mentions the phone company--is amazing.

--Here we go all Larry Flynt doing Andy Rooney: Remember when the girls in Playboy had tanlines and untrimmed pubic bushes? You don't see that anywhere in the Hefner empire anymore, not even in the college girl issues where there would possibly be girls who would be unaware there was a more attractuve way of being naked. I guess porn is so widespread at this point that there isn't any kind of natural nakedness in our porn anymore; if you're going to convert yourself into an erotic object, you know what to do to not look ridiculous at all levels of society. Or something like that.

--If you liked the Giffen-DeMatteis Justice League, you'll love the My Little Pony version. Via Kevin of Howling Curmudgeons, who points out:

Thus proving, once again, that art resides not in the result, but in the execution. These are well-conceived, artfully painted and re-sculpted; the details chosen to evoke the characters are precise and right. Go. Award pointless creativity for its own sake.

The thing is, I would not have expected the Giffen-DeMatteis League to engender this kind of obsession--then again, I am obsessed with that version of the League (JLA vol. 2, issues 1 through--what? 50 or 60?) myself. It was the only version of the League (or any topflight superhero group) that was absolutely different from what had gone before, or since, for that matter. I guess my initial impulse is that something I love as much as those comics should not cause another person to come up with this sort of fanboyish art. And yet--there it is. Proving once again that pop culture's meaning is personal--you decide for yourself how to react to it. Or: I love those comics so I write about them and reread them sometimes; other people, it's My Little Ponys. Different strokes, you know the rest.

All right, Wolves-Lakers Game One is on.