The Season of Giving is already weighing down on me something fierce. I hadn’t even started really thinking about Christmas gifts before the websites started giving me more deadlines I had to meet to guarantee shipping by December 23rd. Apparently I’m already way behind. So I went out tonight to do a first pass, hoping that the perfect gifts for everybody would jump out at me. It took a little over two hours and I didn’t get anything but discouraged.

People have told me that I’m hard to shop for, because although I’m not quiet about stuff I think is cool, I’ve usually already bought it for myself. All right, I’ll give you that, but look at it from my perspective. Being a shallow consumerist whore makes it really difficult to buy stuff for other people. The stores are filled with stuff that I want to get; they stand out. And nobody bothers meeting me halfway — when I’m going on about some DVD or the Apple store or whatever, they just nod and wait for an opportunity to change the subject, never doing what conversation dictates and interrupting me to talk about what they want.

It’s even worse now that I don’t really talk to people anymore, but just make long blog entries and then read occasional comments in response. Nobody bothers to say, “Yes, that’s a fascinating point you make about Wikipedia and online news aggregation sources, but have I mentioned how my favorite movie blank was just released on DVD?” Or “Another gripping and insightful commentary on ‘Alias!’ It reminds me of how much I want to read Some New Book Title.” Or even better, “That was a captivating example of navel-gazing self-obsessive introspection. In response, here is a step-by-step list of how to buy gifts for women that don’t involve Borders or Best Buy.”

So the Season for Giving is now also the Season for Wanting. Use the comments section to drop hints of varying degrees of subtlety about what you’d like me to buy you (or make for you, but you’re just setting yourself up for disappointment if you go that route, I’ll warn you now) for Christmas. (Or Hannukah, if you’re one of my Heeb friends, assuming I haven’t already missed that.) (Or, for that matter, whatever weird-ass thing the rest of you celebrate in December that makes Decent God-Fearing People such as myself have to resort to “Happy Holidays” while you kill Christmas.)

I have to warn you that I still don’t have a 100% accurate picture of who reads this blog, and I can’t guarantee that a comment will get you a gift. But you can’t win if you don’t play. Sample comments could be, “Your post about the new Mustang reminded me of this new set of stainless steel knitting needles that are really awesome,” or “I agree with you about ‘Arrested Development’ and would like to watch volumes 1 and 2 on DVD.” Amazon links are welcome.

It could be said that this just ruins the whole spirit of the thing completely, but think of it as your gift to me. People are always, okay frequently, giving me the perfect thing that I never would’ve thought to get myself and it turns out to be a very nice and thoughtful gift. And I don’t like to be reminded that that’s a talent I lack.

Q: What do you get when you cross a JAP with a nerd? A: Me, apparently.

My Roomba came today, and I swear to God it made sense for me to get one back when I ordered it. I was tired of seeing the bits of styrofoam and big dust tumbleweeds all over my hallway that’ve been there for the past few weeks, but I was out of vacuum bags. My dream-logic rationalization was this: I could just go to Target, find the bags, get them home and see they don’t fit, go back to Target and get the right ones (I did all this, last time I moved), vacuum everything up, and then go back to being too lazy to vacuum for another eight months or the next time I had to move.

Or, I could make an investment in a fairly expensive robot vacuum, which costs more now but would be more likely to get used more often. Put it that way, and it’s a bargain! And I’m realizing that I’ve got to clean more often around here — I don’t want to get too graphic, but I’ll just say that I’m way too hairy to only vacuum twice a year.

So I took the thing out of the box, and I swear it shuddered a little when it saw the floor. It was kind of like a Russian mail-order bride who’s resigned herself to making sacrifices in order to start a new life in America, but then she gets off the plane and sees her new husband is Michael Moore. After I charged it up and let it wander around a little, it got to the bathroom door and immediately turned around. I’m sure it was just because of the lip of the floor into the bathroom, but I wouldn’t have blamed it even still.

It managed to navigate around both rooms of my apartment and the hallway without much incident, although it did threaten to chew up my speaker cables (they warn you about that, and they need to get taped up anyway) and it got stuck under the couch and had to call for help so I could dislodge it.

When it was finished: well, the results weren’t all that great. There were still plenty of missed corners, and it left long strings of hair and lint on the edge of the rug. But to be fair, it was kind of like sending a coal-mine canary into Chernobyl. I put a new bag in the upright vacuum (now that I had already bought the Roomba, my brain switched out of have-to-buy-new-gadget mode and reminded me that I had one spare left from the last time I moved) and did a pass over the whole apartment. It was a lot easier knowing that it was the last time I’d ever have to do it.

The thing comes with a remote so you can drive it around yourself; I haven’t used it yet because I don’t have any batteries. So now all I need is a cat and a teddy bear. The only part that bugs me so far is that they had to make it “cute,” so it has a different beep for all its different cleaning modes, including a little “uh-oh” beep when it gets stuck. It sounds too much like those little Simon games and programmable robots from the 80s.

I’m not going to lie; now I want a Scooba too, but that’s not going to happen. They’re twice as expensive, I just don’t have the floor to warrant one, and besides, two cleaning robots would be getting into OCD clean-freak territory. I ended up washing the kitchen & bathroom floors “by hand” tonight, and I just locked the Roomba in the bathroom to sweep up the leftovers. It’s in there, banging against the walls and the door like William Hurt in Altered States.

I’m sure it won’t be long before it starts to put the pieces together. “I serve Human. I clean floors. Human is dirty. Human makes floor dirty. Must eliminate Human.” But if it gets all uppity, it’s really not fast at all and I can just out-run it into the living room. It’ll get lodged under the couch and then I can just point and laugh while it beeps for help.

I think I’m going to call it “Lupe,” because “she no Dust Buster.”

My SFist article this week is brought to you by the letter I, for Insomnia.

The reason I went on so long is because I’ve been reading about Wikipedia ever since I saw that libel story. And the more I read, the more I had the feeling that there was just something troubling about the whole concept. It wasn’t until I read the article from the Encyclopedia Britannica guy calling it a “faith-based encyclopedia,” and the one from the co-founder talking about “anti-elitism” that I figured out what it was.

The core attitude behind Wikipedia is the same one behind the Intelligent Design “movement.”

Every time you read about Wikipedia, people talk about it in Darwinian terms. The articles get better through natural selection, they say, and only the strongest articles will survive. It’s as close to being a pure democracy as possible, is the claim, and because everyone has equal say, it’ll eventually reach some kind of objective truth — errors are weeded out, as are highly opinionated pieces, and they maintain the rallying cry of “neutral point of view.”

Which is bunk. Robert McHenry used the quote from a Wikipedia article:

“Arguably, he set the path for American economic and military greatness, though the benefits might be argued.”

as a demonstration of just plain poor writing and the lack of editorial oversight. Sure, it reads like a C-average high school student’s history report, but there’s a deeper problem there than just lazy writing. It’s lazy thinking.

This is how they deal with “controversy.” Any crackpot with an internet connection and an opinion has an equal crack at the encyclopedia, which means that even the most innocuous articles — from Mother Theresa to The Andy Griffith Show — can result in a debate. And contributors will invariably begin shouting “NPOV!” and editing articles to acknowledge every inane point of view, watering them down to the point of being meaningless.

And whenever I hear “lazy thinking,” I immediately think of Intelligent Design. Not that the people behind that movement are lazy; on the contrary, they’re insidious and dangerous. But the way they work is by taking advantage of lazy thinking on the part of average people. It’s ingeniously disguised as a populist movement (even though, of course, it’s anything but). It takes advantage of the little sound bites and high-level overviews of fundamental concepts, then twists them in order to discredit them.

The ID crowd takes advantage of the fact that a lot of people hear “man didn’t descend from monkeys!” or “evolution is a theory!” or “there are scientists who don’t believe in human evolution!” and just stop there with their thinking. Even though those three things are true, they don’t do anything to discredit evolution and are in fact an important part of the scientific process.

The ID crowd also takes advantage of the anti-elitist, anti-intellectual attitude — the same attitude that made people think GW Bush would’ve been better suited for the presidency than Al Gore, because the former would be “more fun to have a beer with” — to try and discredit human evolutionary theory. The scare talk is: They want to keep religion out of your children’s schools, but they refuse to have their own beliefs questioned! They’re forcing your kids to blindly accept a controversial theory without listening to everyone’s opinions!

Everyone with any sense should be wary of the ID movement, but it puts liberal Christians (which I consider myself to be) in a particularly tough spot. Complain about Intelligent Design, and you’re labeled an anti-religious secular humanist cultural elitist. Acknowledge that you do believe in an intelligent Creator of the universe, and you’re still lumped in with the ID crowd and labeled a fundamentalist.

But more offensive to me than some religious debate is the idea that dumber is better. That there’s some inherent value in not being an expert or a professional. That just having a different opinion, even if you can’t back it up, is enough to constitute a “controversy.” Just because billions of people, including myself, believe in a higher power doesn’t mean that that belief has any place in a science class. And just because you believe that you are a special snowflake (Jessica’s expression) with strong opinions doesn’t mean that those opinions have any place in an encyclopedia. Get a personal blog, where you can pontificate all you want — just don’t piss on a public resource and then try to claim that it’s the truth.

My favorite comic book of all time in the history of the world ever is The Amazing Screw-On Head by Mike Mignola. It’s just brilliant; the art is Mignola’s usual Hellboy style, which is to say awesome, and then the concept and the writing is dead-on perfect absurd humor.

It’s all old news at this point, but to keep up the hype and because I’m excited: An animated series based on the comic for the Sci Fi channel is in production and scheduled to air in 2006. Mignola was described as “art director” in one of the previews for the series.

The show’s going to be directed by Bryan Fuller of “Wonderfalls,” which I haven’t seen but is another one of the series that geeks are yelling at Fox for cancelling. This old article from SciFi.com has an interview with Fuller where he describes the concept:

“We took [the] concept of the comic book — which is a robot head that screws into a variety of robot bodies and fights crime with President Lincoln in the late 1800s — and decided to tell the ‘real’ story of the history that we read in books, like what would be between the pages of the history books.”

Fuller, who discussed Amazing Screw-On Head while promoting the DVD release of his acclaimed but short-lived Fox TV series Wonderfalls, added: “That gives you the opportunity to tell these outlandish stories that are grounded in historical fact. For instance, President Harrison died of pneumonia after 30 days in office. But you discover it wasn’t pneumonia, and it wasn’t fluid in his lungs, but some sort of agent that he was using to get everlasting life because he wanted to be the president of the United States forever. But what it did was turn him into a frog-man, and now he lives at the bottom of the Mississippi, and he’s about to launch an attack on the Capitol. So it’s those kinds of stories.”

I hadn’t heard about the casting, so that was a nice surprise. Paul Giamatti as Screw-On Head, David Hyde-Pierce as Emperor Zombie, Molly Shannon as Patience the Vampire, and Patton Oswalt as Mr. Groin. The only way it could be any better would be to cast Patrick Warburton and Gary Cole.

So far, it sounds like everybody involved gets it and understands what makes it cool. I can’t wait to see how it turns out. One of the things that was neat about the comic was that it was a total one-shot: it came out of nowhere (for me, anyway), and stood on its own as just 20 pages of concentrated genius. I’m wondering if it’ll work as well extended into a full series, but I remain cautiously optimistic.

And in other somewhat belated news: the trailer for the third X-Men movie is up on Apple’s trailers site. Looks great. Fans are bitching (no, really — comic book fans are actually complaining about something on the internet) that it’s directed by Brett Ratner instead of Bryan Singer, but I remain optimistic. The series is in full-on franchise mode at this point, so you’d have to be colossally incompetent to break the momentum now. And I actually kind of liked Rush Hour, which considering it had Chris Tucker in it, is saying a lot.

I’m not sure what gut level these X-Men movies are working on, though. I never a fan of the comics, and my exposure to it was limited to reading (and not liking) one or two issues, and seeing the old animated series and the more recent “X-Men Generations” series. But I loved the first two movies, and even just watching that trailer I kept having moments like, “Is that Kitty Pride?” and “Whoa, that’s Angel!” and “Beast looks bad-ass” and then wondering where the hell that all came from.

Speaking of being a p—y: I was talking tonight to my friend Matt who’d come out to SF for a business trip, and we got on the subject of being subjected to weepy movies in public places. There is a short list of movies that it’s okay for guys to cry during: Brian’s Song, Old Yeller, and possibly Rudy. I don’t have the final ruling, but I believe Schindler’s List is acceptable, too.

(One thing I forgot to mention tonight: in the “Justice League” animated series, one of the recurring jokes is that the tough ex-marine Green Lantern John Stewart cries at the movie Old Yeller. See, because it’s his one weakness. Which is genius.)

The problem is watching one of these movies in public, like a theater or even worse, an airplane, and having to find a way to cover up the fact that it’s made you cry. For me, sometimes I go for the “I’m just wiping my glasses” maneuver, but these days I usually don’t even bother trying to cover it up. I’m way too over-sentimental and easily manipulated, and for me to deny it would be ridiculous so I’m not even going to try.

I can’t even say that it’s a case of me being all girly, because there have been more than a couple times where I’ve been mocked for crying at a movie by the woman I’d seen the movie with. For example, “Is everything okay? It was just Forrest Gump for crying out loud.”

So I figure: why not embrace it? I’m a big weepy baby. The following is a list of the things that make me cry. (I’m going to limit it to movies and books and the like, not obvious things like bullies, hot sauce, bouts of seasonal depression, nose-hair trimming gone awry, or the current administration. I’m also going to limit it to stuff that works on me consistently, not cheap-shot manipulative things like the aforementioned Forrest Gump, which I admit depressed the hell out of me the first time I saw it, but I’ve seen since then and was able to correctly identify it as Touched By An Angel-level crap.)

• “The greatest honor of all is having you for a daughter” from Mulan
• “My friends, you bow to no one” from The Return of the King
• “I wonder if it remembers me” from The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
• “It’s been a tough year, Dad” from The Royal Tennenbaums
• Completely random and unpredictable moments in Be Sweet by Roy Blount, Jr.
• The end of an episode of “Cowboy Bebop” called “Speak Like a Child” where Faye sees a tape of herself as a child cheering her future self to greatness, and she says, “I can’t remember”
• Finding Nemo in the bit where Marlin leaves Dory and she gets lost
• The end of The Catcher in the Rye (but in my defense, I was in 7th grade)
• The beginning of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius where he matter-of-factly talks about his mother’s cancer
• The last chapter of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
• The last scene of Pom Poko, when the man sheds his human disguise to run into a clearing and join a party of tanuki

There are most likely others that aren’t occuring to me now, but it’s good to get that out of my system and onto the internets. Passers-by can feel free to use the comments section to add their own, or mock me.

Update: Ones that got me but I didn’t list, and I’m not trying to cover up:

• Grave of the Fireflies, because come on. That movie is designed to make you cry.
• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, because I was having a very painful infected gall bladder attack
• The bit in Microserfs where the mom types “MY DOTTR” on the screen, because that’s such a blatantly manipulative moment in a shallow, self-conscious and manipulative book that I can’t believe I ever liked it

Update 2: Because I just realized this looks suspiciously like your typical livejournal post, I suppose I should add: Mood: procrastinating.

It’s probably just because I’m a big p—y, but I think the best way for a TV series, movie, or any other piece of art to show that it’s got merit is in how it handles sentimentality.

And that’s yet another way that “Arrested Development” gets it exactly right. If you were cynical, you could say that tonight’s episode (”The Ocean Walker”) had all the in-jokes, continuity, and references to previous episodes that helped doom the series from the start — the “every episode I’ve seen is funny, but I’m coming into it too late to get caught up” syndrome. It’s got all the self-referential jokes required for post-modernist humor (including the still shot from Monster) (which was just genius). And it’s got everything you need to make it edgy, since it’s basically about a guy trying to have sex with a retarded woman and his family’s attempts to hide that fact so that they can steal her money.

But then the ending was just sweet, and done so well. To paraphrase Ron Howard, it was “such a nice moment” and a perfect ending to that storyline.

It reminds me of a movie I haven’t seen yet: Sarah Silverman: Jesus is Magic. From what I’ve seen of Silverman’s stand-up routine in the past, I can tell that her whole schtick is taking the anti-PC shock-value routine and putting a little bit of a spin on it. And based on the reviews, it sounds as if the spin is there enough to be detected, but not enough to save the movie. One gag that keeps getting repeated in reviews is the line:

Recognizing the political incorrectness of using the term “retarded,” she facetiously corrects herself with “And by ‘retard,’ I mean ‘They can do anything.”

Again, I haven’t seen the movie, but it sounds like she just leaves the joke there — funny, but nothing more than a shock-value joke until you take it in the context of the rest of her show. The bigger joke is that her on-stage persona is so wide-eyed and self-involved and naive that she says something like that and really believes it.

I think that “Arrested Development” started with basically the same gag, but managed to work it into the episode for a real pay-off that’s genuinely sweet and romantic. (And then, of course, only lingered on it for a second before going back to an in-joke, because you don’t want to get too corny.)

The easiest comedy in the world is just doing a reverse on PC speak and patting yourself on the back for being “edgy.” Harder is dodging sensitive material altogether and still making it funny. Harder than that is doing the anti-PC thing for laughs and then layering a bigger message on top of it, like “South Park” and Silverman’s act. And then the hardest of all is to take that and add a genuine layer of sentimentality to it, without coming across as overly earnest and undermining your credibility as someone who’s able to see through the schmaltz.

That’s where “Arrested Development” is too good to be a sitcom, and why it turns out Fox really does suck, after all.

A friend’s e-mail reminded me that it’s already the 5th of December. I keep thinking of this TV movie where Robert Hays gets a gold watch that can stop time and various hilarious hijinx ensue. If I had it, I think I’d just use it to get caught up on work and reading. Which of course raises no end of philosophical questions — in particular, would the internet continue to function if time had stopped for everyone else?

I’d intended to already have flight reservations for the trip back to GA for Christmas. A helpful travel tip: don’t wait until the second week of December to make flight reservations for Christmas, unless you like spending over $900 on plane tickets. I don’t (and really, can’t), so I had to wrestle travelocity to the ground and threaten to spit in its face and tickle it until it started peeing unless it gave me a cheaper flight. What I ended up with routes through Las Vegas, has me flying out the day before Christmas Eve, and still is over five hundred bucks. I just want to say again how much I hate airlines and flying in general.

But apart from that, how about that Christmas spirit, huh? There’s a chill in the air, the frost is lining the car windows, and the new GAP ads are starting up. TV comedians are already starting in with the seasonal “isn’t it funny how people don’t appreciate that Jews don’t celebrate Christmas?” material, and the ultra-violent and/or scatlogoical Rankin Bass parodies are making their way to the internets.

Since I’m going to be in SF for so long, I wonder if I might actually need to get a tree this year. In a depressing turn of events, Urban Outfitters is no longer selling the pathetic Charlie Brown Christmas tree. The alternative would be something that I’d have to find room for and then, I guess, decorate, and then have it just sit there without presents under it. Maybe I’ll just get into the Christmas Spirit by vacuuming instead. Bah!