BY THE WAY: CNN is kicking the other two newsnets' butts, if simply by virtue of having live overnight coverage. For instance, rogue Orleans Parish schoolbuses are showing up at the Astrodome posing as Superdome evacuees. (Which is, of course, a problem that will continue as long as everybody knows the Astrodome is a safe haven. They had footage earlier of people being turned away from the Astrodome simply because they weren't coming from the Superdome.) And only CNN has the story.

(And this nation really needs a better way to handle refugees than sticking them in obsolete domed stadiums. Still, if you're going to keep the Astrodome--and it's probably a historical landmark at this point--you should put it to good use.)

Besides, wouldn't you rather hear about a disaster from Aaron Brown than one of those wretched Fox partisans? Hey Brit Hume--nobody gives a flying fart what Cindy Sheehan thinks about the hurricane!

I'M SURE IT'S JUST COINCIDENTAL: But doesn't it seem like it took the looting to get the cavalry called up? I mean, it probably really is coincidental. But it's an uncomfortable juxtaposition: looting footage, the Mayor starts talking tough, police are called away from rescue efforts and onto protecting the downtown.

At least the water levels have apparently stabilized.

TIMES-PICAYUNE BLOG: Here.

KATRINA KOMMENTARY: It's like some bad Bruckheimer-Bay production. "You survived the hurricane....can you survive--THE FLOOD?" I mean, Sunday night, the newsheads were saying that New Orleans was not going to get dead-on hit like everybody feared, and I think there was a bit of a sigh of relief. But a levee's been breached and every half-hour NPR tells me that New Orleans is filling up with water. Well, great.

And I think we all know now that New Orleans is in the middle of a giant bowl.

THE FAIRLY OBVIOUS JOKE OF THE MOMENT: But--but--the Preznit can't release oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve! That would only provide comfort and succor to future hurricanes.

Make that the "very obvious joke of the moment."

UPON FURTHER "KILL BILL" REFLECTION: As well as watching Vol 1 and 2 at near-saturation levels over the past few days (plus both movies are in rotation on one of the Encores this month--those are great movie channels, by the way, even if everything is pan and scan and all the Hong Kong movies are dubbed) I have decided that no, it is not a bad thing that we're sympathetic to O-Ren Ishii. And it's actually good anime, what with the emotion-drenched Italian Western score in the background (by Luis Bacalov, who I've never heard of but apparently he did a whole lot of Western scores. And if you love Tarantino for nothing else, you love him for hipping you to great stuff you never heard of) accompanying O-Ren's mother's blood dripping onto her face. I still--STILL!--don't understand O-Ren getting only half her revenge. She clearly sees who kills her father--she looks up and growls at him! (And I don't buy the "Bill killed O-Ren's father" thing, which is supposed to be something David Carradine confirmed but I can't find proof of him saying that anywhere on the Internets.) It's not her movie, obviously, so maybe she got the other half of her revenge before she got to Boss Matsumoto. Only Tarantino knows for sure. And that's the great thing about "Kill Bill"--you know Tarantino has an idea about what happens to everybody. He's said many times how much he believes that if you're going to build a reality, you better know what's going on in it, even if you don't let the audience know everything. After exploring the groundlings-eye view of his little world in his first three movies, we're now seeing the gods and (mostly) goddesses who inhabit his universe.

My own little stab at the Tarantinoverse: Nikki--Copperhead's daughter--will grow up and take her revenge. I don't know if she'll be successful or not; she's up against at least one monster (The Bride, who admitted her monsterness under the influence of Bill's truth serum, admitted how she enjoyed every single killing she performed in the first volume) and possible a second (the grown BB, who, the child of two monsters, stands an excellent chance of being a monster herself. She probably is one; that little girl they cast as BB, she was cute, but you also got the chance that she knew something that maybe she shouldn't.) Tarantino said Sofie gets all of Bill's money and funds Nikki's vengeance. Maybe we'll get Gogo's sister too. (Tarantino never filmed a big big fight he had written between The Bride and Yuki Yubari, sister of Gogo. Gogo ended up getting Yuki's good lines.) We don't know if Nikki's a monster or not, but when people are justified in taking revenge in Tarantino's world, they succeed (was O-Ren born a monster, or made one? I don't know.) So maybe we can predict The Bride's demise at the hands of Nikki right now, without knowing how BB plays into it. Nikki kills Bride, BB comes after Nikki for more heapin' helpings of revenge? And BB will be successful, since she is the natural born killer where Nikki is not? I dunno. But I can practically guarantee it will be better than the Star Wars prequels.

And--gawd--I love the Kill Bills. I love the DePalma sequence with Elle going out to poison The Bride in the first one. I love the Gogo-Bride fight--it's clearly derived from Master of the Flying Guillotine, with a bit of Raimi stuck in (the comic sound effects, the quick closeups) but it becomes original in the retelling, like Kill Bill itself. I love the Leone-Morricone sequence in the casket, juxtaposed with The Bride's flashback to the Shaolin monastery. I love the Shawscope logo and the "Our Feature Presentation" thing that anyone who has ever gone to a local midnight screening of some Italian horror junk will recognize. I love the Old Klingon Proverb. These are fun fun movies.

HEY YEAH: I can see closing Ft. Monmouth here in the Dirty Jersey--but why close Walter Reed with all the scores of injured coming back?

....Never mind: they're just building a new one.

THE PROBLEM WITH KILL BILL: It's the anime sequence--it just doesn't fit. It gives Lucy Liu's character a degree of sympathy none of the others got, and makes her future alliance with Bill inexplicable. It's not particularly interesting as anime, either. I don't quite understand why he put it in there.

My theory is: The other genres Tarantino built Kill Bill out of--samurai, kung fu, Italian Western, a little Italian horror; all the seventies schlock genres--that was the stuff he grew up on. But he couldn't have been exposed to anime in great quantities until much later, since it was only sparsely available in this country until fairly recently. It's not something he lives and breathes like he does the rest of the films he uses. It certainly isn't "grindhouse cinema"--it's "your parents' basement" cinema. So--I mean--that explains why it sort of sticks out like a sore thumb in what is otherwise an incredible movie. Why he made the decision to use something he didn't have such a strong command of, when he made so many other good choices in 1 and 2, that I can't explain.

JEAN CHARLES DE MENEZES: The revolting conclusion.

THE ROBERTS ADOPTION THING: Traven in an Atrios comment thread--here and here--explains why there's nothing shady about what the Roberts did. Via Is That Legal? via Atrios himself. Yes, I followed a link from Atrios to Muller back to Atrios. My thoughts:

1. The circumstances of the Roberts' adoptions is a perfectly legitimate area of inquiry. International adoptions can be shady, and there was a not-insignificant chance something illegal/unethical could have happened in their adoption.
2. The fact that Drudge started this means it was most likely designed to gin up outrage from the right, which is what has in fact happened.
3. You can't judge the Roberts for wanting their children to be of their race; that's probably none of your business. You can't judge them for going international to adopt either--how would you like to worry about regretful birth parents showing up at your door with a legal team for fifteen years? But we don't even know if the Roberts picked their kids for their Irishness or not; as Traven suggests, the veddy Catholic Roberts probably went through a Catholic charity to adopt their newborns, and, as you may have noticed, Ireland is full of Catholics.

As you were.

HOW LOVELY: The greatest destruction of Max Boot ever.

BSG: FRAGGED: Just wanted to throw my thoughts up here about last week's episode before I got home tonight. The delay, in this case, indicates I wasn't too excited by this episode. Like, I thought Valley of Darkness was saved by strong characterization in the absence of a particularly cohesive plot. But this episode depended on just about everybody acting goofier than they usually act. Consider:

--In the space of a week, the President reduced to mumbling in her cell.

--Tigh hits the liquor a little hard and ends up going over-the-top. He called Richard Hatch "laughing boy," which is funny, but not necessarily something I expect him to say.

--Baltar loses every bit of his reason. He usually has a back-and-forth with Nine, though eventually he does what she wants. But in this episode he is one with his mania.

--And Nine wants Baltar to "be a man"? When was that ever in the Cylon plan? (What is the Cylon plan? Please--please, second season of Battlestar Galactica, do not go Matrix sequels on us.)

--I can see why Crashdown would feel guilty for losing Socinus and especially Tarn (and isn't it cute how BSG redshirts have names?) but his freakout was out of nowhere.

Only the unconscious (Adama), the dialogue-challenged (Lee, Gaeta) and the level-headed crewpeople who are never in charge (the Chief, Dee, Billy) were in character. I did love this exchange, though:

Tigh (snapping): "Why aren't you in the brig?"

Billy (after a pause): ".....because....no one put me there?"

Tigh: (long stare. Walks away.)

But no Sackhoff and no Park means the show lacked their distinct charms (Sackhoff's moodiness and edgy whimsy, Park's strange relationship with my Tivo's pause button) and when you pull a few people out of your ensemble cast, the show doesn't function as well. But the odd character turns were why this was the first episode I found mediocre.

UPDATE: Oh hey, and did you notice Baltar putting his hand on Female Crewmember's leg just after the Raptor blew up the Cylons? It was either 1. an extremely human moment after a tense near-death situation, or 2. Baltar going riiiiight back into character. I'm guessing 2.

WOW: That's two urinary incontinence ads in one CBS Evening News commerical break. I guess we know who's watching legacy newcasts.

BLOG VS BLOG: The anthropologists vs. Larry Diamond fans thing had been one of the more interesting blogfights in at least a few months.

UPDATE: Jared Diamond. That's Jared Diamond. I'm sure somebody wants to fight Larry Diamond--just not anthropologists.

DEFENDERS #1: I won't get it until my comics come in the mail at the end of the month, but Neilalien actually goes to comics shops and he has a page-by-page review up. He really liked it. Ah, DC, you shall rue the day you killed Sue Dibny.* Rue, I say!

*And I know Giffen said they didn't leave because of that. Allow a poor fanboy his conspiracies.

LONDON "BOMBER" A BRAZILIAN?: This story's getting weird.

BSG: VALLEY OF DARKNESS: Let's do a little checklist here, since it will avoid critical thinking for a moment. Plots advanced this episode:

Billy & Dee
Baltar & Six and their mumbo-jumbo
Crashdown: Threat or Menace?
Chief: nicest guy on Galactica
Tigh: biggest dick on Galactica
Helo & Starbuck
Lee Adama, Our Hero
Laura Roslyn, Our Savior
Kat & Hot Dog Survive One More Episode

Plots not advanced:
Either Boomer. (Has one of the main credits players not appeared in an episode before? And Tigh and Chief need to ask their agents why they aren't in the main credits yet.)

And have you been reading Wallwriting's BSG reviews? They're quite good, and he gets them up there fast. I loved his conclusion for "Valley":

It wasn't a terrible ep. There were just so many contrivances. They run into D; and exactly how large a planet is Caprica? Thrace's apartment, the museum, the Cylon base, is it all in the same zip code? They all go to aft damage control. Good stories have events and the characterization and themes are demonstrated by how they work around the events. Bad stories have characters and themes and the events are contrived to work around them to make it easier for the storyteller. This was a bad story.

Yet, the characterization was so good that it's hard to dismiss this ep as a loss. In fact, in so many ways it was a roaring success. I am very glad that they have decided to shuffle which characters interact with each other. It's a great way to shake up a TV series without have to take the tired old route of adding a baby to the series, that always spells the jump-the-shark demise of... oh frak!

Yeah--even when the situations are somewhat contrived--or to put it charitably, when the drama demands the central characters constantly be put it in certain high-stakes situations--the characterization is usually amazing on BSG. And the characters did well this episode; here's more thoughts, in a list:

--Billy and Dee. I love these two--they're like refugees from a John Waters movie or something who keep wandering through this bleak post-apocalyptic show about genocide. It was completely contrived to have Dee be the only live one in a room full of corpses, and yet it gave Billy the chance to show concern in his own repressed, fumbling way. Their final scene, with Billy pulling the curtain on the camera, was cute as all bug-out.

--The Death of Socinus. That's what I thought while watching it--"This is the Death of Socinus, and it will be thought of in that way, with capital letters, as something important that did happen in the second episode of the second season of Battlestar Galactica." Chief arguing with the medic, reminding her that she wanted the medkit and what they lost to get it and now it's too late?--Crashdown refusing to deal the euthanizing dose himself--"He's your man, Chief"--Chief telling Socinus all matter of comforting lies, we not even knowing if Socinus heard them, Cally breaking down, as she always does, and yet continuing, as she always does--it was a great scene. Would that every redshirt got such a scene (and Socinus was essentially a long-running redshirt) they would perhaps fear less the inevitable untimely passing that comes with the shirt.

--Chief and Cally were good in the forest too: Cally comforting him, Chief ignoring her, Cally dropping the mother-frakker bomb, Chief looking back in mock astonishment ("Mother frakker? Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?") and then the hug and the kiss on the top of the head. The Chief takes every death of a man he is responsible for personally, and cares for all the members of his little flock in his understated way (I think he think they're all, like Socinus, "tough kids"); he's like the Adama of the non-coms. He is the Adama of the non-coms.

--Lee's starting to wonder about what the hell he's doing--did you notice that? He told Jammer they'd have to roll a hard six (or was it eight?) and then had to admit he had no idea what it meant. "Just something my dad says." And his end wrap-up with Tigh at the Adama bedside, questioning if he was cut out for whatever it was he just did (shooting a charging Cylon in mid-flight--who is cut out for that?)--it's his brother's death still lingering, of course, but a new kind of self-doubt, one that isn't rooted in "my dad got my brother killed."

--Roslyn: will she embrace full-on messiah-hood or will she just keep letting others talk like she is? They keep teasing us.

--Helo and Kara: Okay, I dig the vibe they were going with the piano in the background and the idea of rest and reflection in the midst of the chaos of this episode. I was actually getting a Blade Runner vibe (the scene where Rachel was playing in Deckard's apartment), but I think I've mentioned before that I think the new Battlestar Galactica is a Star Trek vs. Blade Runner mashup, so I clearly can't be reasoned with. But, as Wallwriting points out:

Speaking of Thrace, it looks like we have an answer to the age old question: How little chemistry could two actors have together on screen? Katee Sackhoff and Tahmoh Penikett have the chemistry of an inert buffer and... something that doesn't react with an inert buffer. Look, that's the best I can do right now.

That was why Boomer and Helo had chemistry--they're both mild actors and mild characters. Starbuck and Helo are supposed to have had a relationship, and I can kind of buy it, actually, Helo being like a "safe"choice for Kara or something, and Helo looks like the kind of affable lug who is deluded by women on a regular basis. But Helo could barely pretend to be interested that Kara's revelation that she's not fighting to get back what she's lost--she fights because she fights. She's Starbuck, the Girl Who Fights. And Helo barely raised an eyebrow.

Wallwriting is dead-on with this, by the way:

I also can't believe it's coincidence that in last week's episode, Tigh had taken a similar assessment of a before and after period in his life and how he liked himself then and now. With Tigh, he doesn't really seem to like himself now. He didn't like himself back then either, but after his commission, something that he once felt would be the key moment where his whole life would come back together into a happy state, even after he gets what he wants, he finds he still isn't happy.

Meanwhile, here's Thrace, who is now doing her own before/after reassessment going all the way back to her knee injury. She knows she wasn't happy back then, but she is happy now. Thrace and Tigh are so similar. She's the self-destructive hot head he used to be, and he's the shell of a human and officer that she could become if she doesn't do something about it now.

And yet Adama loves and needs them both.

Anyway, yeah, this episode was as strong as any other episode of BSG in the characterization department. And that's what you watch it for, I think, and why you don't bother Tivoing Stargate: The Legendary Journeys or what have you. It's what sets this show apart.

DEAR MEDIA: It's possible I'm the only one who cares about this, but could you please point out that the word "Asian" means something different for Americans than it does for Britons? Asian in American parlance means East Asian and is meant to replace the old racist code word "Oriental;" Asian in British parlance means brown people of Indian or Pakistani origin. We don't have a blanket term for brown people, and they don't have a blanket term for yellow people.

That is all.

BSG "SCATTERED" THOUGHTS: You know--I was worried they were going to shove Sharon out the airlock. But not I'm thinking, if they do do that, it gives us a perfect chance to do a Cylon's-eye-view of stuff, as she'd just wake up in a new body somewhere. Maybe with her human self intact and questioning the Cylon way. Of course, Tigh remembered that killing her doesn't kill her just in time, since he had all the flashbacks to help him out.

Yes--Tigh got all the flashbacks, so this was kind of the Tigh episode, even though they hit on every subplot: Baltar and Six, Kara hates Boomer, Helo loves Boomer, other Boomer hates herself, Tigh's wife wants to take over, the President is the world's craftiest politician, Lee has issues with Adama and Adama is almost dead. Tigh got all the flashbacks and they were during moments where maybe you would think moments where Adama did something relevant to the situation Tigh was in were. And clearly, Tigh was trying to do what he thought Adama would do. But he kept flashing back to scenes of his friendship with Bill, not to any particular thing Adama would do. So they ended up being more a measure of his affection for the man, which Tigh sort of translated into making the command decisions he's always been crappy at making. So he ended up channeling Adama's leadership due to the personal ties he'd established with him. I thought that was nice.

Helo must feel like a sucker at the end of that brief scene. I'm kind of a believer in complex internal Cylon emotional lives, at least in the human models, so I don't think they'll go down the road that she was only using him, and I can kind of see her leaving since Kara wants to kill her and all. Still--Kara told him so. And until preggers Sharon comes back, she's right.

Let's see. They had the obligatory extra-cast-member death. (The guy with the slicked-back hair. In Star Trek he'd wear red....) They went through a whole space battle without a single cut to a cockpit, explosion, scream--I guess their pilots are getting better. I'm enjoying the breakdown of team order on....whatever planet they're on, with Crashdown being clearly overwhelmed and at the same time not enjoying The Chief knowing a lot more about what to do than he does. The undercast continues to be great: Calley, Gaeta, Dee; Billy hanging around the President's cell was a nice touch. That medic whose name escapes me. I do hope they don't turn Gaeta Cylon--you can't recycle a subplot that quickly, methinks.

So it was a Tigh-tinged subplotarama but it clearly wasn't a letdown, which is what I was worried about. And I was amused by the sudden reappearance of the bridge officer from the miniseries. I guess he was in the bathroom all first season.

GASP! PAGS JUMPS THE SHARK: I wish it wasn't so, but Wil Wilkinson makes a convincing case that everyone's favorite public intellectual has lapsed into "old-cooterism". Apparently she forgot that the Internet changed everything, as far as subverting all the old information channels. Odd for someone who got famous, or more famous, writing Salon columns.

MONGOLIAN WRESTLING: Check out Blockhead Dan's threadumentary on the DVDVR message board.

THE SCANDAL THAT KEEPS ON GIVING: Steve Clemons linking to Justin Raimondo. I do declare, Plame/Rove has something for everybody. It's the Summer Olympics of scandals.

AN IDEA WHOSE TIME HAS COME: Mac Thomason has this great online contest going in which 64 ESPN anchors/personalities are pitted against each other in an NCAA bracket-like tourament. Winners advance by being more loathsome than the person they're matched up against; for example, Stu Scott is a 1 seed, Scott Van Pelt is a 16 seed, and Stu is massacring Scott right now. Anyway, check it out and go vote.

MY OWN PRIVATE MORGAN SPURLOCK: Yes, I am in possession of a sheet of Arby's coupons that expire at the end of the month--why do you ask? I don't think I'll suffer quite like Spurlock did, McDonald's being America's nastiest fast food franchise and all. Nor will I receive any notoriety, as no one is throwing bricks through the windows of the Paris Arby's. ("Know what they call curly fries in France? Les fries de curles.") But I will eat cheap for the rest of the month.

And that, oh Internet, is the first point I've had to make in weeks.

NO TIME TO BLOG: But this dialogue between bitch phd and John Emerson in the aftermath of the whole "Kos hates women" and "NARAL sells out to Chafee" things is a good read.

A SAD ADMISSION FOR A FRIDAY AFTERNOON: I really like the wings at Applebee's, America's favorite fake-folksy chain restaurant. I'm so sorry for not caring about wings enough to know any better.

There. That feels better.

POST? SURE--LET ME JUST STAY AWAKE HERE FOR A MINUTE: My next two and a half weeks involve Calculus III from elevenish to twoish, then work, then Computer Science 101 from 6 to 9:30 (no "sixish" because the guy seems intent on using every available millisecond of classtime.) So maybe I'll sneak in a few posts in here or there. Sure.

MORE SNOWFLAKES: Pandagon Jesse's been "poking around":

The Houston Chronicle has a more recent story on the matter, and it's a doozy.

The couple was matched with and adopted 10 unused embryos from a family in Michigan. Three survived the thawing process (the survival rate is about 50 percent), and were implanted in Tracy's womb. One took hold. The whole process cost them about $7,500.

Hold on...this is what they said earlier:

Embryos are "human beings from conception," Houston native Tracy Jones, 32, said Tuesday. She proudly showed the first picture of her child — when he was just a mass of cells.

The Joneses were among more than a dozen families who traveled to Washington this week, with the children they bore from unused embryos they "adopted" from other families, to protest a House bill that would expand the use of embryonic stem cells in medical research.

They adopted ten children and killed nine of them? This is the new face of adoption - near-genocidal disregard for your $750 globsicles?

I think they just think all the blastocysts deserve up-or-down votes. ZING~!

NOW I AM IN FAVOR OF STEM CELLS: All cute and pluripotent as they are. But I find the existence of an embryo adoption agency to be really interesting. The children the President used in his photo op today (to grandstand against the House's pro-stem cell bill) were the results of this agency's efforts. What they do is collect embryos leftover from IVF treatments and make them available for implantation in willing parents. There's something quite science fictiony about it.

IN A MOVIE MOOD: Rewatching Empire and New Hope last night (on widescreen Han-shot-first laserdisc format) and googling for reviews I came across Alex Jackson's I Viddied It On The Screen, his collection of on-line reviews. Which are readable, informed, and kind of Kaelesque, who I think is one of his influences--he references her quite a bit. I thought the title was a Kael reference too but he says it's a movie reference in the FAQ. Anyway--I've been killing hours over there today. Really good, distinct reviews where the author isn't afraid to interject himself into his writing (which is, again, very Kael).

SO: I expect we'll be served a big heaping cup of outrage about the Saddam underwear pictures appearing in the Murdoch papers, right? Absolutely. Any second now.

Yep. Outrage coming. I'll just stand over here and wait for it, then. For the big pile of outrage that's coming.

Mm-hm. Outrage.

RANDOM EPISODE III THOUGHTS: In no order:

No ultrasounds in the galaxy far, far away, I see.

Jedi sure do combust fast, when they're not being easily disposed of by clones who can be turned against them by the push of a button.

A clone named Commander Cody. Thank you, George.

It was nice to see Uncle Owen gazing into the Tatooine sunset. Perhaps he will inspire Luke's need to escape his surroundings in some small way.

Jar Jar: no dialogue whatsoever. Thank you, George.

Jimmy Smits will never die on camera unless Lucas revisits A New Hope again. Unfortunate, that.

Padme and Anakin have the most excruciating on-camera relationship in filmic history.

It was nice to see George give the Star Trek II reference with the full-on Darth Shatner when Vader learns of Padme's death. KHAAAAAAAAAAAAN!

There was a lot of endearing goofiness that is one of the things I've always associated with Star Wars (unlike the crap goofiness that was everywhere in Phantom Menace.) Like when Bruce Spence was whispering to Obi-Wan all of the sudden: "Oh hey, Master Jedi. Nice to see you. Sure you can borrow it. Psssst! Droid overlord! Up there. UP THERE." Or the weird sudden closeups of characters who get one line of dialogue (like in that Monty Python joke: "But it's my only line.....") So I'm seeing where the it-felt-like-Star-Wars thing is coming from.

The Trade Federation aliens lost their Asian accents all of the sudden. They were still awful.

We didn't need to see Chewbacca.

McGregor and McDiarmid were great, especially McDiarmid in full Wicked Witch of the West mode.

It was nice to see the New Hope rebel starship interiors. Comforting, in fact. Also comforting: James Earl Jones.

Was Boba Fett in this? I had heard that he was but I didn't notice him.

It was good. I was entertained.

BRIDE OF CHET: This whole Chet discussion has been fascinating. I am wondering, though, is there a single type of woman who marries a Chet, and maintains the Chet numbers across human populations? The basic Chet qualities, as explained by ObWi von, are:

1. Smart and personable, with the ability to be an asshole to the right people at the right time.
2. Uncurious in an intellectual sense. (My distillation of von's point 2, which might not be exactly what he meant.)
3. Hard-working.
4. Risk-taking.

The female Chet--let's call her "Muffy"--would probably at least have to have characteristic 2, so she'd be compatible with Chet and not keep him up all night with dreary dull conversations. They probably have 1 in common too. 3 or 4--I dunno. I figured I'd more throw it out there.

THE STAR WARS EPISODE III CRITICAL CONSENSUS: Reading the tomatometer it seems like Episode III is about as good as Jedi, which means it's pretty good. I'm getting a lot of the "Hey--this feels like a Star Wars movie" vibe from the reviews.

UPDATE: This Star-Ledger review makes the point that the turn of Darth Vader could've been done in one movie, and I agree. Just cut out the drek from I and the endless debate from II and you'd be left with the Darth Maul fight, the pod race, and....I can't remember the set pieces from II. There was Ani hacking sand people to death (".....the WOMEN....and the CHILDREN.....") and Obi-Wan fighting Boba Fett Sr. on the neato aqua-planet of the cloners. The rest was filler--and Lucas really should've picked up the Padme/Anakin relationship in mid-romance, since the most cringe-inducing scenes in I and II were from their meeting ("Are you an angel?") and their early "dating," for lack of a better word. Apparently their relationship is still bringing the cringe in III, but there's less of it.

Maybe that "Phantom Edit" guy can put it all together. The Ledger review also says this:

"Sith" is the longest "Star Wars" episode, its running time augmented with subplots involving younger versions of well-known characters like Chewbacca and Boba Fett. These cameos are of little use beyond nostalgia and demonstrate how the filmmaker's reverence for his own creations has clouded his judgment as a storyteller.

This, I'm a bit worried about--it sounds like when Spock shows up in Next Generation episodes, or--shudder--Shatner meeting Picard. And I still think Lucas has no idea why Boba Fett was cool in the first place--why kill him goofy in Jedi, and then coat the prequels with the Fett genome unless you had no idea why the Fett underoos were so coveted?--but I'm just a fan with a blog.

CHEAPEST GAS IN MY AREA: $1.909 in Pennsauken, New Jersey. It's one of those indy stations where it takes them five minutes to run a credit card transaction, so I actually went to the Riggins that was 20 yards away where it was $1.919. So I paid a penny a gallon more for a smooth credit card transaction. There you are.

AND THE STORY FEEDING MY NATIVE PESSIMISM TODAY: Dana Milbank:

While Washington plunged into a procedural fight over a pair of judicial nominees, Stuart Butler, head of domestic policy at the conservative Heritage Foundation, and Isabel Sawhill, director of the left-leaning Brookings Institution's economic studies program, sat down with Comptroller General David M. Walker to bemoan what they jointly called the budget "nightmare."

There were no cameras, not a single microphone, and no evidence of a lawmaker or Bush administration official in the room -- just some hungry congressional staffers and boxes of sandwiches from Corner Bakery. But what the three spoke about will have greater consequences than the current fuss over filibusters and Tom DeLay's travel.

With startling unanimity, they agreed that without some combination of big tax increases and major cuts in Medicare, Social Security and most other spending, the country will fall victim to the huge debt and soaring interest rates that collapsed Argentina's economy and caused riots in its streets a few years ago.

"The only thing the United States is able to do a little after 2040 is pay interest on massive and growing federal debt," Walker said. "The model blows up in the mid-2040s. What does that mean? Argentina."

"All true," Sawhill, a budget official in the Clinton administration, concurred.

"To do nothing," Butler added, "would lead to deficits of the scale we've never seen in this country or any major in industrialized country. We've seen them in Argentina. That's a chilling thought, but it would mean that."

More:

The unity of the bespectacled presenters was impressive -- and it made their conclusion all the more depressing. As Ron Haskins, a former Bush White House official and current Brookings scholar, said when introducing the thinkers: "If Heritage and Brookings agree on something, there must be something to it."

Yet that is not how leaders of either party talk. Former Treasury secretary Paul H. O'Neill recounted how Vice President Cheney told him that "deficits don't matter." President Bush projects deficit reductions in the coming few years but ignores projections that show them exploding after that. And Democrats, fighting Bush's call for cutting Social Security benefits through indexing changes, are suggesting that only tinkering with the program is indicated.

The congressional staffers, accustomed to sitting on opposite sides of the room in such events, seemed flummoxed by yesterday's unusual session in the Rayburn House Office Building. One questioner suggested Republicans are to blame for multiple tax cuts; another implied the problem is a Democratic appetite for spending. The bipartisan panel would not be goaded. "I'm willing to talk about taxes if you're willing to talk about entitlements," Butler offered.

Not surprisingly, the Heritage and Brookings crowds don't agree on an exact solution to the budget problem, but they seem to accept that, as Sawhill put it, "you can't do it with either spending or taxes. Eventually, you're going to need a mix of the two." Butler wants taxes, now at 17 percent of GDP, not to exceed 20 percent. Sawhill prefers 24 or 25 percent.

But such haggling seems premature when both parties still deny the problem. "I don't think we're there yet," Walker said. "The American people have to understand where we are and where we're headed."

And where is that? "No republic in the history of the world lasted more than 300 years," Walker said. "Eventually, the crunch comes."

He wasn't talking about filibusters.

Via that Carpetbagger guy Kevin Drum is always linking to.

AND A NEWSWEEK ASIDE: The cover story to the dreaded riot-causing issue, Does the Future Belong to China?, by Fareed Zakaria, is worth a read.

2046: Neat IMDB thread about the performers apparently using different dialects within 2046, and Wong Kar-Wai letting them do it.

MISSING THE POINT, NEWSWEEK EDITION: Instapundit uses this paragraph (from Anne Applebaum):

It is also possible that Newsweek reporters relied too much on an uncertain source, or that the magazine confused the story with (confirmed) reports that prisoners themselves used Korans to block toilets as a form of protest.

To make this point:

I had missed those confirmed reports, but heads should roll at the Pentagon for this.

Not because it happened, but because we didn't make it a big story across the Arab media. That's unforgivable.

That paragraph's natural environment looks a little like this:

Now, it is possible that no interrogator at Guantanamo Bay ever flushed pages of the Koran down the toilet, as the now-retracted Newsweek story reported -- although several former Guantanamo detainees have alleged just that. It is also possible that Newsweek reporters relied too much on an uncertain source, or that the magazine confused the story with (confirmed) reports that prisoners themselves used Korans to block toilets as a form of protest.

But surely the larger point is not the story itself but that it was so eminently plausible, in Pakistan, Afghanistan and everywhere else. And it was plausible precisely because interrogation techniques designed to be offensive to Muslims were used in Iraq and Guantanamo, as administration and military officials have also confirmed. For example:

· Dogs. Military interrogators deployed them specifically because they knew Muslims consider dogs unclean. In a memo signed by Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez in September 2003, and available online, the then-commander in Iraq actually approved using the technique to "exploit Arab fear of dogs."

· Nudity. We know (and the Muslim world knows) from the Abu Ghraib photographs that nudity has been used to humiliate Muslim men. More important, we know that nudity was also approved as an interrogation technique by Donald Rumsfeld himself. He signed off on a November 2002 policy memo, later revised but also available online, that specifically listed "removal of clothing" as a permissible, "category II" interrogation technique, along with "removal of facial hair," also a technique designed to offend Muslims who wear beards.

· Sexual harassment. The military's investigation of U.S. detention and interrogation practices, led by Vice Adm. Albert T. Church III, stated that at Guantanamo there were "two female interrogators who, on their own initiative, touched and spoke to detainees in a sexually suggestive manner in order to incur stress based on the detainees' religious beliefs." Although the report said both had been reprimanded, there is no doubt, again, that the tactic was designed for men whose religion prohibits them from having contact with women other than their wives.

· Fake menstrual blood. When former detainees began claiming that they had been smeared with menstrual blood intended to make them "unclean" and therefore unable to pray, their lawyers initially dismissed the story as implausible. But the story has been confirmed by Army Sgt. Erik Saar, a former Guantanamo translator, who told the Associated Press that in a forthcoming book he will describe a female interrogator who smeared a prisoner with red ink, claimed it was menstrual blood and left, saying, "Have a fun night in your cell without any water to clean yourself."

There is no question that these were tactics designed to offend, no question that they were put in place after 2001 and no question that many considered them justified. Since the Afghan invasion, public supporters of "exceptional" interrogation methods have argued that in the special, unusual case of the war on terrorism, we may have to suspend our fussy legality, ignore our high ideals and resort to some unpleasant tactics that our military had never used. Opponents of these methods, among them some of the military's own interrogation experts, have argued, on the contrary, that "special methods" are not only ineffective but counterproductive: They might actually inspire Muslim terrorists instead of helping to defeat them. They might also make it easier, say, for fanatics in Jalalabad to use two lines of a magazine article to incite riots.

Blaming the messenger, even for a bungled message, doesn't get the administration off the hook. Yes, to paraphrase Rumsfeld, people need to be very careful, not only about what they say but about what they do. And, yes, people whose military and diplomatic priorities include the defeat of Islamic fanaticism and the spread of democratic values in the Muslim world need to be very, very careful, not only about what they say but about what they do to the Muslims they hold in captivity.

You see the problem? The bits that I bolded? The way the Applebaum piece sort of destroys the blame-Newsweek argument? The way he wants heads to roll for not publicizing Guantanamo prisoners backing up toilets with their Korans, and not for continuing to treat prisoners in a fashion that undermines the United States' stated purpose in the Muslim world? It's like Insty's the Riddler and he wants to be caught.

RED IN VICTORY: So I'm listening to NPR talk about this story in Nature about how British researchers are floating a theory that wearing red gives athletes a slight but not insignificant advantage. They looked at combat sports in the Olympics--where the participants are assigned red or blue colors at random--and red-wearers won 55% of the time. So I was thinking, well, numbers aside, this is probably pretty silly, and then one of the British guys they were interviewing said this started as a water-cooler discussion, where it was noted that the long-term successful English football clubs Arsenal, Manchester United, and Liverpool all wore red. And then I was like, well, American sports teams don't really wear red, do they? I mean, there's the Red Sox, whose long-term futility is only exceeded by their fellow red-wearers, the Philadelphia Phillies. The Cincinnati Reds have had moderate success, but not dominant success. The Raleigh-Durham Skyhawks--the only World League of American Football team to never win a game, wore red. The only successful red-based American team I can think of is Indiana basketball. Oh--and, of course, the Red Wings, who were a dominant team (after decades of futility, I should mention) in a league that doesn't exist anymore. So there you go.

I'm guessing the red effect was some kind of statistical aberration--as whoever NPR brought in to provide the counterpoint suggested--and I would love to see who was wearing red or blue in each individual contest. One of the researchers is an evolutionary biologist, and he was trying to tie in redness as a sign of aggressiveness with redness having some kind of unconscious effect on those who wear it (or those who are confronted with red-wearers), but I'm thinking there isn't much there.

HEH, AS THEY SAY: NYT:

Even on the conservative, all-Republican bench that the State Supreme Court had become, Justice Owen occasionally stood out among her colleagues, sometimes in tandem with another justice, Nathan Hecht. In no situation was this more so than in cases involving the interpretation of a state law providing for a teenage girl to obtain an abortion without notifying her parents if she can show a court that she is mature enough to understand the consequences.

In one dissent, Justice Owen said the teenager in the case had not demonstrated that she knew that there were religious objections to abortion and that some women who underwent abortions had experienced severe remorse.

Mr. Gonzales, a Texas Supreme Court justice at the time, was in the majority and wrote that the position of the three dissenters was "an unconscionable act of judicial activism" because it would create obstacles to abortion that the Legislature did not enact.

Mr. Gonzales, in interviews with The New York Times, acknowledged that his words were directed at her dissent but said that he remained enthusiastic about her nomination to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

But he has been repeatedly pressed by conservatives to declare that he did not mean her. Recently, he tried to distance himself from the remarks by telling a Senate committee that he was referring to himself, not the dissenters. His apparent explanation seemed to be that it would have been an act of judicial activism for him if he had done what Justice Owen and her two fellow dissenters had done.

Via TNR via Laura Rozen.

HEY--THE WASHINGTONIENNE STORY IS BACK, SORT OF: Julian Sanchez:

Remember micro-scandal over Washingtonienne, the Capitol Hill kiss-and-tell sex vendor whose copiously blogged exploits roiled the Beltway last summer? (No? Lucky you.) Well, now there's a little coda, and it's actually more interesting than the former senatorial assistant's inventories of receiving a toaster for anal sex or a pearl necklace for a pearl necklace.

Thank you, Julian Sanchez, for teaching us to laugh about small-time Washington sleaze. Again.

The story, anyway, is that somebody she had talked about is now suing her for emotional distress. She never made Playboy like we all thought she would, did she? There can't be a big payout there, except in vindictive capital (as the Reason commentators suggest.)

LEARN A NEW STEREOTYPE EVERY DAY: Asian people can't drive? That I can safely say I had never heard of. Thank you, Internets. I guess.

And I work in a big trauma center and it's not like we're bursting over with Asian MVAs. But I do live in South Jersey and most of the commentators on the Yglesias thread seem like they're from San Francisco, so there you are. And the accident accident Matt describes is more of the goofy confusing reverse with forward and winding p in a tree kind than the hitting the pole at 90 m.p.h. kind.

RISE OF THE SUPERVILLAINS: Here's a Charles Paul Freund post about the possibility the Saudis have rigged the entire kingdom to blow up if anybody tries to invade. Yes, it's completely ridiculous, but so are the Saudis, and I wouldn't put it past the nation responsible for 9/11. They've displayed plenty of aptitude for the bad kind of creative destruction before.

Two 9/11 references on one day. I must be returning to the warblogger womb.

SAY--: Isn't blaming Newsweek for deaths via riots in Afghanistan kind of like one of them thar blowback arguments, the kind one could easily dismiss when left-wing nutters argued that the United State was ultimately responsible for 9/11? Why, I believe it is. It's just as tenuous, at least, taking people's explanations for the horrible things they did at face value.

You should read Arthur Silber's analysis of this "scandal."

UPDATE: You should really read Layne-via-Welch's analyis of this "scandal" too. Part 212 of Why Instapundit Doesn't Link To Ken Layne Anymore.

UPDATE UPDATE: In case this isn't clear yet--you are completely frigging insane if you are blaming Newsweek for the deaths in Afghanistan or if you are suggesting Newsweek needs to be prosecuted in court in any way.

UPDATE THE THIRD: Kevin Drum: "As near as I can tell, the Pentagon has demonstrated more genuine outrage over this incident than they did over months and months of disclosures of similar (and worse) actions at Abu Ghraib. It's revolting."

SALETAN GIVING ID A LITTLE TOO MUCH CREDIT: When I read Saletan saying this:

The new challenger, ID, differs fundamentally from fundamentalism. Like its creationist forebears, ID is theistic. But unlike them, it abandons Biblical literalism, embraces open-minded inquiry, and accepts falsification, not authority, as the ultimate test. These concessions, sincere or not, define a new species of creationism—Homo sapiens—that fatally undermines its ancestors. Creationists aren't threatening us. They're becoming us.

And I'm like, isn't the whole problem with ID is that it isn't falsifiable, makes no predictions, follows from no evidence, and so on? RPM at the evolgen blog noticed the same thing.

EEK: If Abu Ghraib wasn't disturbing enough, the back story makes it creepier. I wonder if this lends any credibility to the few-bad-apples hypothesis. Something along the lines of, "See how freaked out these people are? Of course they were going to start taking naked pictures of the prisoners!" But I'm thinking it's more likely that while the particular form Abu Ghraib took on was influenced by the Graner-England-Ambuhl triangle, torture-via-porno was a lame idea brought down from the higher levels of authority.

WOW: Peter Vecsey kills Dan le Batard deader than dead after Le Batard's whole "white people might like Nash over Shaq" thing. Via SLAM. I always read a little bitterness into Vecsey when he writes about fellow journalists with TV jobs (like Le Batard's frequent substitutions on PTI) while he hasn't been on TV since his TNT job a few years back. But he really makes Le Batard look like a cretin for kind of half-picking up the racism card.

OKAY--I KNOW LITTLE ABOUT ECONOMICS: But is there any concept of a corporation's lifespan? I 'm listening to NPR and they're talking about United Airlines and their bankruptcy and them trying to shift their pension plans to the government because the plans are these big dead weights that are preventing United from seeking investors. And I'm thinking, why don't they just let United die? Sell everything off, use that to fund the pensions, let somebody else step into or grow in the marketplace. I can't imagine what is gained by keeping it alive. I mean, I think I know the answer: it's too big to let it die. But that's not a good reason.

YOUR STRIPPERS IN THE PUBLIC CONSCIOUSNESS REPORT FOR THE WEEK OF MAY 1ST, 2005: For those of you keeping score at home:

If you're a female, describing your night out at the strip club is just cute.

If you're a male, describing your night out at the strip club is unspeakably sleazy, makes you worthy of public condemnation, and--most tellingly--did not actually happen during the week of May 1st, 2005.

There you go. For what it's worth, there is a chance I could have found Laura's speech funny if it hadn't been so obviously scripted. Which may be why I can't enjoy any of the members of the Bush team.

THE HEY?: How to disappear in America without a trace. Via Howling Curmudgeons. Well, you never know when it'll come in handy. Kind of a lot to print up and be on the lam with, though.

THE APPEAL OF RIGHTWING TALK RADIO: And Fox News, which has adopted that style--I've figured out the appeal, for me anyway. You know the current of the debate is permanently skewed in the direction of the hosts. You know the guests/people calling in are either selected for their ineffectiveness or are self-selecting not realizing their ineffectiveness. And yet sometimes the caller will manage to outargue the host, land unanswered questions, and otherwise get the final point in before they get cut off, despite having everything against them.

It's like verbal American Gladiators.

FUN WITH THE I.T. DEPARTMENT: For 4/28/05:

"Help desk."

"Hi, I just have a question. Are we no longer allowed to have Firefox on our computers?"

"What's Firefox?"

"You know--it's Firefox. It's a browser."

"And when you try to download it, you get--" he repeated the error message.

"Yes. Can we only use Explorer now, or--"

"Well you can still use Google."

Pause. "Google is a webpage."

"Oh yeahhh...."

MAYBE IT'S BECAUSE THE PRESIDENT CAN'T PRONOUNCE "NUCLEAR"?: Proof that the term "constitutional option" is of very recent vintage. And that the term "nuclear option" enjoyed bipartisan support for quite a while. These stupid word games annoy me more than they probably should.

ONE MORE BATTLE IN THE EVOLUTION WARS: This here Panda's Thumb thread, wherein a bunch of PT regulars take on somebody who isn't defending intelligent design, just the consitutionality of teaching it as science in schools, is very much worth going through. I can't believe I read the whole thing (except for the parts I blooped over.)

GOT A PH.D. IN HATING DUKE: Certainly the longest anti-Duke screed ever. Via the Frog.

BOLTON STUFF: I love the Bolton situation--it's such great political theater, as epitomized by Sen. Voinovich's completely out-of-nowhere turn on Bolton. I also love this analysis of how Bolton and the social security and Delay debacles fit into what may be the final crash and burn of the White House:

A command-control system like the White House-led Republican congressional system can be absolutely formidable for a certain period of time. But when it breaks down, it breaks down completely. The collapse is sudden, and total. Signals get crossed, backs get stabbed, the suddenly leaderless pawns in the system start acting for themselves, with no system or structure to coordinate their individual impulses.

Is this happening? I don't know, but it's getting close. I thought I'd seen it before, but each time they've pulled it back together. This time, I think there's too much happening at once.

The irony of all this for conservatives is that if they actually read Hayek and got anything out of it other than "government sucks," they would know this. Hayek's libertarianism was very pragmatic. Centrally controlled systems are flawed above all because they have no mechanism to correct their own errors, unlike distributed, self-organized systems. The Democrats in the Clinton years always operated in chaos, no one followed the party line, and there was a cost to that, but in the chaos and improvisation they found ways to get out of the holes that they had dug for themselves. The Rove/DeLay/Frist system doesn't have any means for correcting its mistakes -- look at the blank, lost looks on the faces of Senators Lugar and Chafee yesterday when they just had no idea what to do with a nomination that had fallen apart and couldn't fulfill their promises.

The Republicans accomplished unimaginable feats through the centralization of power. Three tax cuts, a prescription drug plan that will make Americans hate government, an insane war. But if the goal was long-term power, it is a strategy they will come to regret, if not today, someday.

Via Obsidian hilzoy.

PARITY LEAGUE > 72-WIN JORDAN LEAGUE: I could also have written this as "FULLY COMPETITIVE NBA > SPORTS ENTERTAINMENT NBA," but feared some would not understand my meaning.

Anyway--the current NBA just set the all-time attendance mark. I believe this has something to do with the fact is more wide-open than it has been in years, both in terms of who can win it all and in the style of the games (the new rules opening things up.) As a Jordan hater, I am glad the league is putting more butts in the seats right now (by putting out a better product) than they were when they were relying on an enormous marketing campaign built around a single player.

THANK YOU, CITY OF CAMDEN: For not taking the portable DVD player in the bag out of my car, when I had left the window open on this beautiful evening and parked one of your streets not located on school property (though very close.) Thank you for showing mercy.

24 TONIGHT: Remember in Warrior of The Lost World when at the very end Fred Williamson was revealed to have been in Donald Pleasence's pocket the whole time? And Crow T. Robot said, in his most sincere tone, "Boy, what a great plot twist"? His words echoed in my head when the lawyer from Not Amnesty International showed up, at 12:30 in the morning and twenty minutes after they captured their suspect, to tell them to stop holding him illegally. And only Jack could figure out that their suspect had no, in fact, called anybody on his way to CTU.

But--note that torture finally worked as Jack extracted the info from the terrorist-abettor via multiple finger fractures. This after he quit CTU because apparently its legal for a private citizen to torture somebody or somesuch. The lesson is torture only works when it is not administered by the United States government--which means extraordinary rendition works! Thank you, 24.

THE KENNEWICK CONTROVERSY: Just getting the word out. Strange group of people getting the word out too, actually, if you click on that link there. This is the thing that allows any human remains found by archeologists on Federal Land to be claimed by Native American tribes, even if the human remains belonged to people who got here before Native Americans. And since Native Americans tend to destroy their dead, this means the loss of irreplaceable representatives of early humankind.

It's not something a ton of people are going to get exorcised about, but it is a pretty blatant coopting of scientific research on strictly political grounds. And so I will get the word out.

I RESPECTFULLY DECLINE: To celebrate 50 years of McDonald's. Look--just because anti-globalization types have chosen McDonald's as their symbol of all that's unholy, it doesn't mean that we who are not anti-globalization types have to celebrate the walking bloated corpse of a company with awful food and milquetoastesque advertising. Hell--just cut them loose. Let them destroy each other. I'd rather see Taco Bells and Carl's Jr.'s opening up across the former Third World then the franchise producing America's shittiest fast food.

IF AN NBA FRANCHISE IMPLODES AND NO ONE HEARS IT--HAS IT MADE A SOUND?: When the Blazers were good you couldn't walk three steps without tripping over a "Rasheed Wallace--Threat or Menace?" bit of handwringing. Now that they stink, but are still sociopathic, nobody cares. Luckily the Sports Frog cares. Darius Miles left the court last night a couple times--once after they substituted Ha Seung Jin for him--and claimed afterward it was a bathroom break. I'm just amazed that Ha Seung Jin got into the game, putting up a Milicicesque 0 points in 4 minutes.

JOURNEY INTO LOATHESOMENESS ALMOST COMPLETE: President set to sign bankruptcy bill tomorrow. Look--if they were trying to make it harder for everybody to declare bankruptcy that would be one thing. But then you read things like this and yes it's a MoveOn.Org press release but still:

The legislation Congress will vote on is more than 500 pages long, all in highly technical language. But the Republican leadership and corporate lobbyists are in such a rush to push it through that the text is full of misspellings and repeated phrases. Representatives might not even be allowed to make amendments. But the overall thrust is pretty clear:

* Make families pay more to creditors, both in bankruptcy and after bankruptcy, so that instead of offering a clean start, a bankruptcy filing will leave families burdened by credit card debt, car loans, and continued payments to banks or to payday lenders.

* Make it more expensive to file for bankruptcy by driving up fees so that the people in the most trouble can't afford to file.

* Make it trickier to get through a bankruptcy so that more people will get pushed out of bankruptcy with no debt relief.

* Make it harder to repay debts by increasing the minimum payments in repayment plans.

* Preserve at all costs the millionaires' loopholes—special privileges that allow the super-rich to escape their debts by hiding their money in special exemptions and trusts.

--You realize it's all a big kick in your unwealthy pants. Even legendary Democratic Presidential ticket deadweight John Edwards is against it. And the President's going to sign it because he has no concept of anything outside his narrow interests. It's all depressing.

BACKED INTO A CORNER: If you wanted to beat up the GOP in terms of their own hypocrisy, this--from Jonathan Rauch--would be the article you'd have to worry about, and wonder, "Well--what can else can I say about this?" It is the summit of articles that attempt to trip Republicans with their own rhetoric.

FROM THE HALL OF UNEXPECTED OBITUARIES: Frum mourns Dworkin. Via alicublog via pandagon.

THE MYSTERIANS ON DVD: I've always been intrigued by The Mysterians, a film I've never seen but was spoken of fondly in an old DVD Savant review. Apparently it got released on DVD fairly recently and the reviews on Amazon have a similiar quality to the DVD Savant's: slightly apologetic but sincerely appreciative, acknowledging that yes, this probably is a flawed film, but it has something to it, and if you were there at the time you know what we're talking about. And I was not there at the time but the reviews lead me to believe that if I had been there I would have liked it too. It's like I'm intercepting somebody else's nostalgia, and maybe--when I do watch it--I'll get more out of it knowing a lot of people really do cherish it, despite its faults.

Anyway--The Mysterians. It's an old Toho release involving flying saucers. Media Blasters has given it the loving full treatment, with new dubs, the full uncut version, Japanese commentary with English subtitles, and separate soundtrack tracks--so says DVD Savant. His summary analysis is:

In 1959, Daily Variety called The Mysterians "a red-blooded phantasmagoria" and that assessment still holds true. It's one of the first movies Savant saw as a kid filmgoer choosing his own fare, and nostalgia is a big factor in overlooking the film's flaws ("What flaws?"). Spread out across a big monitor, it's still a big, fun action circus of spaceships, death rays, explosions and wholesale destruction.

And that's the story of how The Mysterians ended up atop my Netlfix queue.

IT'S FUNNY: Half the time Dr. Baltar is like Stewie in Family Guy: saying stuff and nobody taking him seriously. In Stewie's case it's because he's a baby; in Baltar's case it's because he's a supergenius and is probably expected to be a little weird. But Stewie really is full of loathing for his family, and Baltar really is conspiring with the enemy. The parallels.....are striking.

Yes, I pass the night away with Galactica episodes in the background. I expect another few weeks of this before I get tired of them.

I CANNOT BEAR TO LINK--YET I CANNOT TURN AWAY: Tax days with Morrie. As penance I will never like to another Mitch Albom-related anything again.

REQUIEM FOR A BUGMAN: You would read Josh Marshall for that.

REQUIEM FOR A HUMAN SCUM: You would read Steve Clemons for that.

There you go. I mean--I am not a completely reflexive Republican hater, but it's fun to root against them.

BLACK BOLT VS. WHITE NOISE: Neilalien linked to this New York Review of Books essay by John Leonard, on Jonathan Lethem. Leonard seems to like Lethem but wished he'd put down the genre stuff at some point and reference Don Delillo sometimes. Interesting discussion ensued. Which led me to the From My Living Room To Yours blog, (as well as Radiaton Vibe,) which led me to the blog of Phoenix Suns benchwarmer Paul Shirley, who is an actual good blogger. Read it. Long, descriptive paragraphs, written in a distinctive voice. No archives though; D. Stern probably eats them, and rips them from the Google aether when he can, lest they cause embarassment.

ON THE WHOLE I'D RATHER GET SICK IN.....FRANCE: Matt Welch on the superiority of the French health care system. The comments are fun too.

It's a twofer, by the way: he also explains why Mitch Albom is insufferable.

YEAH YEAH YEAH--BUT IT'S GEORGE KARL: Memphis Bengal on The Frog points out the feel-good story that is the 2004-2005 Denver Nuggets. I'd feel a little better about them if not for their head coach, the man who brought us as a nation inglorious defeat in Indianapolis back in 2002. It's hard to get that excited about them knowing they're going to self-destruct at some point.

Luckily there are other feel-good stories this year--not that they won't end up losing in the playoffs, but at least I'm not completely sure that they will. Like the Bulls, which Bengal also points to. I would say the Celtics are, as the gamble to bring back Antoine Walker to counter Webber's arrival in Philadelphia has worked out so much better than they could have hoped. The freakin' Pacers--making a playoff run after the Palace brawl, overcoming the Pistons' rather crude attempt to get them to self-destruct. The Suns are a feel-good story, or as much a feel-good story as the team with the best record in the league can be. Plus the Wizards and the Sonics, though both appear to be going into the crapper lately. Of course, the Lakers missing the playoffs and Kobe's screwing of the Clippers completely blowing up in his face is the ultimate feel-good story.

I have not watched much NBA this year, I should admit, and so can appreciate these storylines only second-hand for the most part--my school/work schedule occupied enough of my time that I didn't bother with the League Pass this year. But the playoffs are going to be interesting, both because of the storylines and because it all seems relatively wide-open this year. There's no irresistible Laker-like force to root against.

YOUR RANDOM BATTLESTAR GALACTICA QUESTION OF THE DAY: Why does Grace Park look different in every scene? Caprica Boomer is different from Galactica Boomer is different from Nekkid Boomer. Do they shoot her differently? More of those celebrated special effects? Is it--you know--acting?

And did you notice INDC Bill throwing down the geek gauntlet, hyping Firefly over Galactica? I got so upset I almost choked on my ten-sided die. More reasonably, I stuck Firefly on my Netflix. It will have to really be something to replace Cowboy Bebop as the genre-bending space western of my heart, of course.

And from Bill's comment thread I am led to notice that ninme has already had a good little Galactica/Firefly debate.

UPDATE: And another random comment: I hope everyone noticed that the fight between Starbuck and Six in the museum was a Blade Runner reference, complete with terrified human with a gun and disembodied replicant voice mocking her from god knows where. Plus you have throughout BSG the living, breathing Blade Runner reference known as Edward James Olmos. I sometimes think of BSG as Philip K. Dick writing Star Trek, though that is probably not completely accurate.

ANDREA DWORKIN DEAD: At the age of 59. Via the DVDVR. And Majikthise.Who notes the dearth of media commentary about her death.

And Camille Paglia loses one of her greatest foils. Seriously--would Pags have ever taken off like she did if she didn't have Dworkin and MacKinnon to play off of? Not that Pags is as big as she was, and claiming to have invented the blog is no way to get back into the limelight, but still. Would she have been the big 90s-era political correctness-backlash figure without Dworkin and MacKinnon, is the proper question I guess.

L'AFFAIRE DE CAPTAIN'S QUARTERS*: If you were--like me--dimly aware of some kind of Canadian scandal erupting in a certain section of Right Blogland, rivka lets you know what the scoop is. Via Kevin Drum.

*Undoubtedly pidgin French.

THIS IS A TERRIBLY GEEKY POST: And it combines comics geekitude with my status as a regular listener of NPR, which is sort of an anti-Reese's peanut butter cup of maligned subcultures--but I do cringe when comics-related guests go on the Terry Gross show. Because while Terry knows a lot of things, she doesn't know the comics very well. So when Frank Miller's on to talk about Sin City she can't really ask him about his influences because she's probably heard of very few of them. Or the relationship of Sin City to his previous work, because she probably hasn't read them. So it ends up being one of her "light" interviews.

I experienced the same cringing during her Brad Bird interview, when they were talking about The Incredibles and didn't bring up Fantastic Four or Doom Patrol not once. Now in this case my cringing was less fair, since I believe Brad has publicly disavowed any comics influence on The Incredibles, though he does credit 60s pop culture quite a bit, so if there's something in that era that leads to the Fantastic Four and he's stripmining that era for ideas, then perhaps its logical that The Incredibles resemble the FF. So there's no reason for Terry to bring it up. But it would have been nice, just given how obvious the relationship is to anybody who knows the Fantastic Four story even slightly well.

The Doom Patrol Elastigirl question is something only one with the heart of a geek would ask, so that is something I wouldn't expect her to ask. But that interview kind of assumed The Incredibles emerged from his head de novo, which they did not. Not in the sense of Bird-ripping-off-the-FF, which he denies and so that's that, but in the sense that The Incredible were all fairly common super-types (stretchy guy, strong guy, fast guy. If there are any Bird-did-rip-off-the-FF conspiracists in existence they are on firmest ground with the Violet/Sue Storm comparisons, since invisibility combined with force fields combined with being a wallflower is not exactly a typical superhero motif.)

This post will be copied and filed with the Office of Minor Complaints, Internet Division.

CONSPIRACY THEORY OF THE DAY: Gannon/Guckert is the adult version of an 80s child kidnapping case, and Hunter S. Thompson directed snuff films, and it all ties together. Yep. Via the DVDVR. And the respectable version from the Des Moines Register.

A BEAUTIFUL CAMDEN SUNDAY: A woman lies on her back in front of the bus stop, on the sidewalk, knees bent, one hand over her eyes.

MUST....RESIST.....OBVIOUS.....JOKES: Preorder your Identity Crisis Dr. Light action figure now. With....with--WITH REMOVABLE PANTS! Oh, I'm so sorry....

With changeable "sociopathic rapist" and "no more Teen Titans" facial expressions. There--that's marginally better.

YOU--YOU'RE NOT CONSERVATIVES. YOU'RE--REPUBLICANS: John Cole on memogate...gate.

MY FAVORITE COUNTDOWN TO INFINITE CRISIS REVIEW: abhay's dc countdown mocking go! His summary:

well: everyone involved did an awful job. especially the colorists-- lets list them off: moose baumann, hi-fi, paul mounts, guy major, steve firchow. for taking a really bad comic and just making it all the worse-- muddy, gloomy, joyless, overrendered and SOULLESS.

its funny-- i picked up batman year one today. i haven't read it since i was 13. i was at camp. i borrowed a friend's copy. it fucking ROCKED harder than anything. i'd already read dark knight returns, but year one was BETTER. the art was awesome. i never read it again-- until tonight or tomorrow or whenever i get to it.

these people read the same comics i did, must've liked them-- why would they work so hard to get into comics, suck up to editors, work for years... just so they can do the Blue Beetle Snuff Comic Crossover Experience? i guess when you get older you forget that feeling you had originally...

As Jim Treacher said in the comments:

I think I've managed to boil down DC's policy to one sentence: Publish stories that only make sense if you've read every comic they've put out for the last 35 years, and then punish you for having read them.

Via Dave Intemittent.

META POSTSCRIPT: And isn't it neat the way these newfangled browsers copy font and text color? Saves me the trouble of italicising stuff, and arguable is a more accurate way of quoting someone.

THE WASHINGTON PUNDITOCRACY GOES TO A NATIONALS GAME: Details here. Via the Frog. Bob Novak is prominently involved.

OH AWESOME: Blogger is now unblocked by my office firewall. Maybe I can update more often now than twice a week.

I think they updated their filtering software, because now timeouts happen much faster when the search is slow on say Netflix or something, and I get a friendly message to contact my network administrator if this is a problem. It was weird what it used to block, too; all blogspot URLs, yet some of them I could access once a day (like Atrios and Americablog) and others wouldn't load at all. Yet all Typepad URLs were fine. Instapundit was unloadable. I could get to Josh Marshall, Radley Balko and Sports Frog (among others) once a day before the software reblocked them. If I added or removed the www. in fron of their addresses I could sometimes get to them again. Meanwhile I never had any trouble with Off Wing, or Obsidian Wings, or Crooked Timber, or Jim Henley, or Kevin Drum, or many others. Darnedest thing.

THANK THE LORDS OF KOBOL FOR THE ONE-HOUR TELEVISION FORMAT: For I am in receipt of the first season of Battlestar Galactica (a British import--thank you, Amazon.UK) and among the deleted scences are many Boxey scenes. Mostly scenes of him finding stuff about Sharon's increasingly Cylonesque proclivities, so it makes sense to leave them out. I mean, if he knows she's going mental and he doesn't tell anybody, it's a bit of an unnecessary plot hole. Plus he's got that 70s television child star hair and the presence of a kid on the Galactica is just really out of place on the new series. So thank you, Ron Moore, for excising him.

The last two episodes have a lot taken out, actually, and what's missing (save the Boxey nonsense) does add a bit to the episodes. Apollo and Crash visit Sharon in the hospital, where it's explained that they need every pilot they got and yadda yadda and she needs to get back on her feet and how could you leave a bullet in the chamber?, making it somewhat less strange that Adama picks the just-wounded Sharon for the nuke delivery. (If he's a Cylon, that's just weird. Who makes a Cylon with Edward James Olmos' complexion? You can't design that.) There's shots of her practicing her quick-draw motion, which of course would have given away everything in the final scene. And since I am a Grace Park obsessives, that's all I remember of the deleted scenes.

Hot Dog, by the way, is the Wedge Antilles of the new Battlestar Galactica. And the Internet just became slightly more pathetic.

WAYS THE NEW SEASON OF BATTLESTAR GALACTICA COULD GO WRONG: And yes, this is way ahead of time--but if they pull the "Character X is a Cylon" more than one more time I believe that would be cheating, narratively speaking. They could probably do it once more if they did it in an interesting way. More than once, the whole concept will break down in a funhouse of mirrors of paranoid reflections.

Another thing is finding a way for the humans to be a credible threat against the Cylons, for from what we've seen so far everything seems to be going exactly the way the Cylons wanted it to go: most of humanity is dead, and the ragtag survivors are leading them to God. Perhaps when they don't find God we'll see Cylon self-doubt. Or else they'll argue themselves to death like Nomad on the old Star Trek.

Boomer is the key to the show right now, by the way. She's the "weak model," designed to be the most human of the Cylons, and thus far the only one capable of bridging the gap between the two races, if merely in a biological (meaning reproductive) sense. She's also the only capable of emotional connections with a "normal" human like Helo, not a raging sociopath like the easily manipulated Baltar. Plus I'm not seeing a lot of Six-Baltar broodlings stumbling about either. Being human is just not Six's job, but it is Boomer's, and perhaps that'll be another weakness for the true humans to exploit. In a much more coherent way than I just described, of course.

THE LINGERING OF REGRETTABLE RECIPES IN THE MIND'S EYE: About a month ago I tried to adapt the Grandma's meatballs recipes for tofu. I am a tofu novice. I bought the extra firm kind and just used a pound of it and the other ingredients as normal. The meatballs stuck together like meatballs should, mostly. They fried up nicely, but I could tell they were a bit fragile. The taste was acceptable. I thought I could be careful and gently simmer them in the sauce--but there was no way. They were destroyed in the simmering process--every attempt to stir the sauce brought more destruction--and I ended up with this rather disgusting red tofu glop. It's been a month and I can't quite forget how eeeeeyucky this was. I may need counseling.

I bring this up because the Easter raviolis met a similar fate yesterday, as problems with the gas flame boiling the ravis led to the assumption that a little extra time was needed to cook the things. This was not the case as it turned out. The raviolis did not survive the straining process. Dinner was not destroyed, though; the raviolis were not the only dish, and my aunt makes Grandma's meatballs the way Grandma intended, and far better than I can make them.

ANNUAL LONG NATIONAL NIGHTMARE OVER POST: Duke loses.

OBLIGATORY SCHIAVO POST: Because I think Blogger closes your account if you don't say something about it. As I am conspiracy-minded, my favorite comment comes from ObWi Katherine, in the midst of a discussion of the merits of the law Congress actually passed:

You don't get de novo anything, let alone a [temporary restraining order], if you don't state a non-frivolous legal claim. And they didn't. It's as simple as that.

This is first-semester-of-law school stuff. Either the majority was in such a hurry and so blinded by ideology that they forgot to check on the statutory language (they don't lack for lawyers on their staffs), or the Schindlers' attorneys are in way over their heads, or someone high up in the party was playing a very cynical game.

All these losses by all these different courts, all being portrayed as judicial usurpations. How perfectly does it set up the filibuster fight for the GOP? What chance do John McCain and Chuck Hagel stand in a 2008 primary if they don't vote the party line on the nuclear option? And non-presidential candidates can have their own reasons to worry--chairmanships, primary opponents, that sort of thing.

Reid should have been up there arguing that they were blatantly abusing power, that they didn't believe in checks and balances, that they were bullying their way into private matters that were none of their business...they did end up proving our argument all on their own, and the Senate Dems' deal may have prevented a worse bill from passing. And Reid and Durbin were both out of the country. Even so, I think they screwed this one up.

As for Levin's comment, a specific explanation about the meaning of a specific change of a specific statutory provision, which is immediately agreed to by the leader of the other party, is going to carry more weight then some random Congressman's speech about choosing life. And one is supported by the plain text of the statute, and one simply isn't.

The middle paragraph is what I found interesting--the part about the very cynical game and the chance to blame this all on the judiciary. Katherine also directs us to this from Chris Matthews sidekick David Shuster:

Despite the sweeping floor statements about "protecting life," the legislation itself did not require the federal courts to start by reinserting Schiavo's feeding tube. And while the bill does give the Schiavo family "jurisdiction and standing" to make an argument in federal court, take a look at Section 3 called "relief." Section 3 states, "After a determination of the merits of a suit brought under this Act, the District Court shall issue such declaratory and injunctive relief as may be necessary..." The key words are "after a determination..." Congress did not say the federal court must accept the merits of the lawsuit.

Based on what Schiavo's parents have been saying this week, it appears the legislation's fine print was never shared with them by Bill Frist or anybody else for that matter. Early Monday morning, after President Bush signed the Schiavo bill, Bob Schindler was positively beaming in front of the television cameras. He said he walked into his daughter's hospice room and told her, "We had to wake the President up to save your life."

Did Bill Frist and Tom Delay ever call the Schindler family and say, "not so fast?" Apparently not. In their latest court filing, the Schinder family still clings to the misleading notion offered by lawmakers last weekend that their bill required Schiavo's feeding tube to be immediately reinserted. Quote, "If Congress meant to give the federal courts the power to let her die..." says the Schindler's filing, then passing the law "would be little more than a cruel hoax." Read it again... The Schindlers argue: "If Congress meant to give the federal courts the power..." The fact is, that's exactly what Congress did. And a "cruel hoax" on Terry Schiavo's family is exactly the right description. As one of my doctor contacts observed, "This has always been about politics, not about helping Terri Schiavo or her parents."

John Cole's series of battlefield conversion posts (well, not really) brought on by the Schiavo-bankruptcy bill double-punch are pretty great too. And speaking of the bankruptcy bill--the last topic I was obsessively blogreading about, when I was in hiatus mode all those many......two weeks ago--here's John Quiggin dissecting the only credible pro-bankruptcy bill position I've noticed. "Credible" meaning attempting to find a reason for passing the bankruptcy bill that doesn't involve the Republican Party and Joe Biden being entirely in the thrall of the credit card industry. You know--a good reason. There apparently isn't one.

LITTLE BIT OF A HIATUS OVER HERE: Haven't had a whole lot to say lately, I'm afraid. I have been getting into this whole Henley-led new Battlestar Galactica watching, though. I have never had any use for the original--I only know it as a continual butt of jokes on Mystery Science Theater 3000--but this new one is pretty great. I thought originally that Boomer was a sly Bubblegum Crisis reference, by the way, but apparently she is another character derived from the original series.

Back to hiatus mode.