Chuck

I feel great! You can too.

One of my all-time top 5 favorite albums ever recorded is Telecommunication Breakdown by Emergency Broadcast Network. EBN’s schtick was remixing video sources to techno beats, basically popularizing the mash-up a decade before it got popular.

Their video releases were pure capital-G Genius but could get tedious quickly. The best example of that is the original version of “Get Down”, which combined Harrison Ford from Patriot Games, a Mariah Carey screech, and a Dan Rather clip to the beat of “Jungle Boogie,” a brilliant concept which becomes annoying after about 20 seconds. What made Telecommunication Breakdown a highlight is that they had the guy from Meat Beat Manifesto remix a lot of the tracks, to make them work as satire and music.

They got a burst of popularity in the early 90s after their version of “We Will Rock You” was used in one of U2’s concert tours. As is usual for me, I got into them right as they were breaking up, so for years I’ve been stuck with a video, one amazing album, and three QuickTime clips that were included on the CD, hinting at something much greater but that I would never ever see. You can’t really appreciate how clever the music is until you see it with the video sources.

So today it finally dawned on me to check YouTube, and you won’t believe how excited I was to find more videos. This one is the Telecommunication Breakdown track called “You Have Five Seconds To Complete This Section,” and I nearly wet myself when I saw it’d finally been made available online.

It’s just awesome. (And I have to agree with one of the commenters; that does look an awful lot like Jane Lynch.)

More quicktime videos are available from Joshua Pearson’s website, under EBN Archives. You can also do a search on YouTube for “Emergency Broadcast Network” to see lower-quality versions. My favorites: Syncopated Ordinance Demonstration, 3:7:8, Psychoactive Drugs, and eMediatainment (a new one!)

EBN’s finest moment, though, and what made me a lifelong fan, is “Electronic Behavior Control System.” The version up on YouTube & Pearson’s site is edited from a live performance, so it’s not quite as cool as the one that was included on the CD. Still, it’s probably the most brilliant music video ever made:

EDIT: The semi-live version I linked to has been removed since I first wrote this post. The original is up on YouTube at the moment, though, and it’s as brilliant as it was 15 years ago.

> inventory

Six hours of solid door-opening action! I don’t know if y’all have heard, but the SciFi channel has been running a miniseries called “The Lost Room!”

Non-stop promotions aside, this is actually a damn fine show. (It concludes tonight, which would make this blog post seem useless if not for the fact I’m 100% sure SciFi is going to be rerunning it frequently).

A lot of science fiction and sci-fi/fantasy stories start with a high concept, and then go on to tell a traditional story based on that concept. Every history of “Star Trek” mentions that it was described as “‘Wagon Train’ in space.” Most episodes of TV series like “The Twilight Zone” and all the Star Treks were standard drama plots with a high concept thrown into the mix (what would a love story be like if one of the characters were from a symbiotic race that could change gender?) or used the high concept as allegory for something else (can’t you see that I’m half-black and he’s half-white?)

The thing that impresses me the most about “The Lost Room” is that it’s all about the concept. A preview I read described it as being like a videogame, and that’s apt. It’s true on the obvious level — the story really just boils down to a standard adventure game, with a guy collecting inventory items to solve puzzles.

But the videogame comparison goes deeper, in that this is the most successful non-game art I’ve ever seen that conveys that feeling of engagement that’s unique to videogames. That feeling of being dropped in a world with new rules, and the satisfaction that comes from figuring out how to use the rules to accomplish something.

It helps a lot that the series doesn’t insult your intelligence. Especially when it very easily could have; pretty much every single character in the story knows more about what’s going on than the hero does. That could’ve devolved into a lot of really tedious and clumsy exposition, but it ends up making the hero seem like even more of a bad-ass. Explain something once, and he’s not only figured it out, but figured out how to use that knowledge to get farther than any of these other people have been able to.

He’s not a hero because he’s been dropped into the role of protagonist; he’s a hero because he’s actually accomplishing things. The best example is when he uses the properties of the motel room and the missing objects to figure out how to open a locked safe. It was just ingenious.

I’ve been trained to watch TV from “on high,” sitting on a platform just underneath the writers as we both look down on the characters and wait for them to clue in to what’s going on and catch up with the rest of us. With this, I feel like I’m having to hurry to keep up. A villain will shout, “take all the doors and burn them,” and it takes me a minute to realize what that was all about.

And characters don’t spend a lot of time staring with Spielbergian wide eyes and open mouths at the wondrous properties of these mysterious objects; they jump right in and start playing with them. Testing them with stuffed animals, smashing them with sledgehammers, and using them to break locks, break out of prison, or spy on people. A lot of stories introduce the Ring of Power or the Bag of Holding or Portable Hole and then make you wait for that one crucial plot point to come where the hero remembers the object and uses it to save the day just at the last minute. In “The Lost Room,” people have already exhausted every possible use of an object a dozen times over by the time the audience has figured out exactly what it does.

It’s not perfect; the whole love-interest “don’t break my heart” bit was goofy, and I’ve read previews that suggest that the final pay-off is kind of weak (I’ve only seen four hours out of six). But I’ve been enjoying the hell out of it, and not only am I excited about the conclusion, I already wish it were an ongoing series.

My biggest complaint is that I wish Peter Krause would stop harping on about his daughter and the Prime Object and start trying to find the mysterious missing razor. Any guy over 18 (at least those of us who weren’t raised on estrogen-rich soy products) knows that the perpetual haven’t-shaved-in-a-day look takes a lot of effort, and watching six hours of it makes you feel uncomfortably itchy.

R.I.P. Peter Boyle

What shall we throw in now? I guess it’s a little weird to be upset when celebrities pass away, but then few celebrities are as cool as Peter Boyle.

He’s got a permanent place on my cool list just for his performance in Young Frankenstein, of course. But he was great in everything I saw him in — the “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose” episode of “The X-Files,” and every episode of “Everybody Loves Raymond.” It’s a shame that series was so popular and long-running that it created a backlash, since it was consistently funny and frequently genuinely moving, and Boyle was always one of the stand-outs.

What always impressed me the most about Peter Boyle was that he just seemed to “get” it. He wasn’t just somebody delivering funny lines; he was a real comedic actor. The difference is knowing how to play a character as a real person — even an obnoxious or belligerent person — and work it so that it’s true to the character and still comes across as funny and relatable. Reading his obituary makes it sound like he had a pretty interesting life off-screen as well.

Update: Entertainment Weekly’s PopWatch blog has the best obituary of Boyle I’ve seen.

Best Actress in a Supporting Role

Jane Lynch and Fred Willard I was surprised that For Your Consideration had such a low rating on Rotten Tomatoes until I started following the links. Some of the reviews, like the one from The Onion’s AV Club are critical of the movie but still give it a recommendation. I guess that’s a sign that a pass/fail rating isn’t suitable for a Serious Art Medium like The Cinema.

The AV Club gives it a B-, which is about accurate. The people who are going to see it anyway (fans of Best in Show and A Mighty Wind) are probably going to like it, even if it doesn’t attract any new fans. The performances are great as usual, but a lot of the cast is under-used. And the movie has enough laughs to warrant a recommendation, but as a whole the movie feels dated and off-center.

It feels like the usual Christopher Guest/Eugene Levy cast getting together to do an old SCTV sketch, without updating it from the original. One of the reasons A Mighty Wind seemed “off” was that it was stuck between character story and comedy/satire; they liked the characters too much to really make fun of them. The same is true here, but the result is that the movie feels as outdated and out-of-touch as its characters are intended to be. In 2006, who really doesn’t know what the “interweb” is?

And a lot of it is so subtle that you know it seemed brilliant when they were coming up with it, but it doesn’t have enough weight in the final movie. The biggest example is the movie-within-a-movie, a story about a Jewish family in the south in the 40’s which one review calls “Tennessee Williams meets Neil Simon,” a great description. So the characters switch between Yiddish and southern accents, “Oy gevalt! What have I done?” and comedy ensues. They take it a step further in an interview with the screenwriters, played by Michael McKean and Bob Balaban, where McKean admits he’d never heard of the Purim holiday before working on the screenplay. And then that goes a step further later, when a producer suggests they tone down the Jewishness of the movie, and McKean goes off on an indignant tirade about how they’re compromising the integrity of his work. It’s a clever concept, material for great satire, but it just doesn’t come across as funny.

So you end up watching the movie for the cast. As you’d expect, Catherine O’Hara is great, John Michael Higgins is great, and everybody else is good but underused. Fred Willard always stands out in these movies, and in this one he’s doing basically the same so-clueless-he’s-cruel schtick from Best in Show, this time with a faux-hawk and fake earring.

But I couldn’t be a bigger fan of Jane Lynch. She steals every movie she’s in, and she always does it with the littlest gesture or best-delievered line. In A Mighty Wind, it was her winking description of her past in adult movies. In The 40-Year Old Virgin, it was her unbelievably creepy seduction of Steve Carrell. In For Your Consideration, she plays a Mary Hart-style co-host to Fred Willard’s character, and she steals the scene just in the way she stands and walks. It’s just brilliant, and one of the few laugh-out-loud moments in the movie is just her standing there. I’ll go see any future Christopher Guest movies as long as she keeps appearing in them.

Stop winding it up so much please thank you.

All shall love me AND DESPAIR! I was watching “Saturday Night Live” this week (eyes over here, Mrs. Beatty) and the first musical guest was Gwen Stefani doing “Wind it Up” with an over-enthusiastic drum line and a throng of badly-dressed dancers.

It’s difficult for me to describe my reaction to seeing this, but in short: I became firmly convinced that the World is coming to An End. It started as an unfocused sense of unease from deep within my soul. Each yodel and every sample made it more concrete, more defined, until it became a concentrated pit of despair lodged in the center of my heart.

Imagine you’re a simple country villager in the outskirts of ancient Rome, and you’re asked to cater at one of Caligula’s parties. As you stand dumb-struck behind the buffet table, watching the proceedings, the servants wheel in another horse and some more lubricant, and you think, “Well, they’ve finally done it. They’ve destroyed civilization.” That’s the sense I got.

Now, I still like to think of myself as being on the fringes of hipness — not really genuinely cool, but at least at the VH-1 level of social awareness. But seeing this thing rocked my whole perception of what’s going on in American pop culture. It wasn’t just that I didn’t like it; I didn’t understand it. At all. I hated “Hollaback Girl” and “My Humps” like any right-thinking person should, but at least I had a sense of what they were trying to accomplish with them.

“Wind it Up,” with its video and album and fashion line and interviews and promotions and YouTube and MySpace appearances, is such an engineered consumer product package that it’s as far removed from actual music as Lunchables are from actual wheat. Video didn’t just kill the radio star, it’s on Fox News promoting its new fictionalized account of the murder titled If I Did It.

I’ve heard and read a lot of people — usually well into their 40s by the time they say it — say they remember the exact moment they realized they were “old.” Usually it’s when a clerk calls them “sir” or “ma’am,” or when they meet a co-worker who was born the year they graduated high school/graduated college/were released from rehab.

For me, it was watching a woman (who’s two years older than me!) doing a performance on “Saturday Night Live” and me feeling like I just saw a series of mushroom clouds over the horizon.

Wii Todd Ed

Gizmodo has a link to this video of a woman playing the boxing game of Wii Play. The blogger warns that the audio is not safe for work, because it sounds like the woman is in the throes of passion.

Two questions:

What the hell kind of bizarre psychosexual shadow realm are these gadget bloggers living in that would cause them to hear the anguished shrieks and yelps from this video and mistake it for getting off?
People are always asking why more women don’t play videogames. I think we have our answer. And a new question: are we really missing out that they don’t?

What Would David Caruso Do?

You're crazy, pretty lady! For the past week I’ve had Molly Shannon’s voice running through my head. A few years ago, she did a bit on Saturday Night Live making fun of Julianna Margulies for leaving “ER.” As far as I can remember, the whole bit was Shannon saying “You crazy! You crazy, pretty lady!” over and over again. Margulies got a ton of flack for it at the time, but I remember thinking she had a pretty cool attitude about the whole thing. She didn’t need any more money, she felt like she’d done all she wanted with the series, so she left.

Now I’m not, as far as I’m aware, a hot actress, and I sure as hell am not getting offers of millions of dollars to keep my job. But still, I’ve had a pretty sweet deal over the last year and a half. Working with great people for a company I’ve always wanted to work for on a project that was as cool as hell, with flexible hours working from home and occasional business trips to theme parks.

So I did the only sensible thing and quit. When I was trying to make up my mind, I had two different people tell me, “Maybe you’re just afraid of success,” which is exactly the kind of thing you want to hear when you’re a self-obsessed person contemplating a job change.

Fact is, though, that another year like this one would’ve driven me crazy nuts. Getting in crunch mode on a project you’re working on from home means that you can spend an entire week without ever speaking to another human being — I did it several times this year. I’m sure that there are people out there who can tolerate that, who even think it’s ideal. But for me, it’s just no way to live.

All but one of the friends I have in California, I met either directly or indirectly through work. And with the amount I’ve been housebound over the past year, even those are mostly virtual friends at this point. If I didn’t have e-mail and this blog, I’d probably be hanging out at Union Square begging strangers to talk to me. One of the managers at Disney had a great line, which I hope he’s not planning to put in his memoirs because I’m about to steal it on the internets: “There’s no such thing as a five-minute conversation with a contractor. You can schedule a quick conference call, but you have to be ready to listen to how their entire day went in great detail.”

There’s no telling what I’m going to do for a living, now. The idea of getting a job in an office where actual human beings work is pretty appealing, but at the same time it seems like a shame to give up a sweet contracting gig after giving it only one chance. And I’m kind of nervous at the thought of finally escaping the cubicle only to run right back to one. I’m not really looking forward to dong job interviews again, either. You have to validate yourself and explain why you’re a good candidate, which is something I’ve never been good at. I don’t really know why I’m a good candidate, people just keep offering me really cool jobs.

I don’t know, maybe a month or two of confusion and unease that I don’t have a definite way to support myself lined up will be interesting. I got my first job the week before I graduated college, and have either been working or had a job lined up every day for the past 13 years. Maybe this’d be a good time to get caught up on the billion different projects I always say I’ll finish if I ever get the time.

Last Saturday I left the apartment for the first time in a week. Driving over the Golden Gate Bridge on a perfectly clear, sunny day reminded me that there was a time I used to get out and do stuff for no reason. I’d drive down Lucas Valley Road or along Highway 1, or take pictures of random buildings, or walk around Berkeley just for the hell of it. I can’t remember doing that since I moved to Walnut Creek for EA. Maybe I’m not so much afraid of success as I am fond of not working.

The Man With the Golden Franchise

"Yes. Considerably." = BAD ASS When I heard they were doing a reboot of the James Bond franchise, I thought it was a terrible idea. The series has degraded so far down to parody at this point, the only way to do it correctly would be to start releasing them as period pieces.

Not Austin Powers parody, but just turn back the clock to make it all work again. Jump back to the early 60s, where you’ve still got the Cold War and cool cars and you can film everything in technicolor and your hero will seem like less of an anachronism.

I’m really glad to admit that I was wrong. I finally got the chance to get out and see a movie last night, and it was Casino Royale, and it rocks in all kinds of ways.

I was hooked from the opening title sequence. Granted, they didn’t have the cool silhouettes of dancing naked women with guns, but they made up for it with the new theme song, which kicks boatloads of ass and is probably the best in the series. (It’s a drag, though, that the real version of the theme is only available on Chris Cornell’s myspace page, so you have to wade through loads of myspace effluvia to hear it). Best is that they didn’t bother trying to shoehorn the title into the lyrics — none of that “like Heaven above me, the spy who loved me” nonsense that Carly Simon didn’t have the stones to reject.

I’ve seen almost all the Bond movies, but have never really been a fan. I let myself get excited about the one with Michelle Yeoh, but of course they wasted her and ended up with just another all-hype, no-substance action movie. And seeing as how in retrospect, that was one of the better Bond movies of the past 20 years, I’m surprised they didn’t just give up the entire franchise the moment Denise Richards came on screen.

Casino Royale is impressive because they made all the right choices every step of the way. For starters, they cast the right guy. I don’t have any problem saying Daniel Craig’s the best James Bond; Sean Connery’s a movie star, but this guy is an actor. An actor who does a kick-ass job with the action sequences, too. He’s as cool playing poker as he is stopping jets from exploding.

There was a ton of negative hype around the casting before the movie was released, and you can see why — in still pictures, he doesn’t really look the part. But as soon as the movie takes off, he owns it. He plays Bond not as a superhero, but as a real person who is really good at just about everything. It was the first Bond movie I’ve seen in years that lived up to the ideal of the character — you can’t be a guy watching the movie and not think, “I wish I were that much of a bad-ass.”

And everything else shows that they just get the true appeal of the character, and not what it had turned into. They remembered that he’s a spy, and should therefore be doing the kinds of thing that spies do — more of the investigating leads and gathering information, less of the riding space shuttles and jumping on alligators and putting on the worst “Japanese” disguise in the history of cinema. By scaling back the action sequences, they made them a lot more impressive. The opening chase through a construction site is just amazing, even without the invisible car or snowmobile chase or secret backpack parasailing chute.

There’s a long sequence where Bond is trying to stop a bomb at the Miami airport. It’s inserted into the plot seamlessly, the pacing is dead-on perfect, and the editing is not only genuinely surprising, but manages to make one of the most tired cliches of action movies (“We’ve got to stop that truck!”) exciting again. It ends up being the best car action sequence since the one in Raiders of the Lost Ark. But the best part of all — it culminates in an explosion, but the explosion happens off-screen. And still you’re left saying, “oh hell yeah!”

The dialogue is excellent, conveying an assload of character with only a couple of words. (“You noticed.”) The references to the franchise are clever and subtle, when they could easily have been over-done. M comments, “God I miss the Cold War,” and that’s the last you hear of it. All the technology has been updated without stealing focus from the plot; it’s almost as if the filmmakers decided that story and characters were important again.

Even the product placement, inevitable in one of these things, was in the end inoffensive. The only way they could’ve worked the Sony brand in there one more time would be to have Bond fire up a PS3 and challenge the villain to a game of Ratchet & Clank. But the story’s got so much momentum behind it, and everything is so well-done, that you barely notice.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen Thunderball and From Russia With Love, but I don’t remember enjoying them as much as the new Casino Royale. This is the first Bond movie I’ve seen where I didn’t feel like I was watching some historical artifact, or seeing something that’s cool only because it’s supposed to be cool. It’s the first Bond movie where I feel I can finally understand what the appeal of the franchise is, and I can’t wait for the next one.

A Tale Told by an Idiot

I mentioned RiffTrax a while back. Tonight I finally got to try it out.

Fans of MST3k have wondered a lot what it would be like if the guys had been able to do a good movie for a change. Well, I still can’ tanswer that, because I saw The Phantom Menace. (Yes, I own a copy of The Phantom Menace. Am I supposed to be embarrassed by that? Please, I have no shame left.)

The RiffTrax deal is just about exactly what I’d expected. Sci Fi Channel-era MST3k with bigger-budget movies and no host segments. It’s pretty damn funny, and I’m looking forward to the other ones. With the commentary and the “DisembAudio” they use to keep in sync, I’d say it’s the best possible job they could do without actually having the rights to the movie.

Now, for the movie itself. Holy cow!

What kind of reality distortion field was I living in when I saw The Phantom Menace the first time? I remembered it was bad, but I’d somehow managed to convince myself that it wasn’t completely irredeemable. It’s pretty, at least. And the pod race is kind of cool, right?

No! It’s such an enormous flaming turd that has nothing, nothing going for it. When it was released, it was bad enough to inspire years of disappointed mockery on the internets. It’s still got all that awful stuff — Jar Jar, midochlorians, racially offensive aliens, a plot so boring and incomprehensible it makes Russian movies seem action-packed.

Now on top of all that, it hasn’t aged well.The CG was the only thing it had going for it, but it already looks dated and it draws attention to itself. There’s just not a single good thing about that movie. It’s been like seven years since it came out, and now I’m mad at it all over again. I want to burn the DVD, but there’s still just enough residual Star Wars fanboy at my core that won’t let me.

Best moment in the whole thing is when Mike tells Jar Jar, “Okay, just go to hell, all right?”

Guilty Pleasure

I honestly can’t tell if “Heroes” has gotten significantly better since I first saw it (and mercilessly ragged on it), or if I’m just starting to come down off my high horse and admit that my tastes aren’t as highbrow as I like to think.

I’ve still got problems with it. Biggest is that the whole thing reeks of Major Network Television. There are the stupid catch-phrases, and the big event gimmicks (“One of the heroes will DIE!”), and the soap-opera casting. Is it just me, or does anybody else think the actress playing the congressman’s wife just looks weird and unnatural?

Plus, it still feels like a bunch of people who are late to the whole comic book party. “We’ve got a superhero who can borrow other superheroes’ powers. Does that not just blow your mind?!?” Well, no, because we’ve seen Rogue do it in X-Men comics for decades, plus there were these movies that came out a while back you might have heard of. The creator of the show has been quick to point that out in interviews — he’s said he’ll come up with ideas and then hear from a friend that there’s already a well-established character that does the same thing. Still, it’s fun to make fun of him for it.

Especially when they try to build drama around it. Their big climax for the first half season was what goes down at Homecoming, and it was all relatively cool. But is there anybody in the audience who didn’t know what was going to happen as soon as the episode started? The character who borrows other heroes’ powers is going to sacrifice everything to save the girl who can survive falls from great height. But oh no! We see a horrible painting of the future showing him fall from a great height!

Fifteen minutes into the episode, my mother, who’s not exactly steeped in comic book lore, said, “After he absorbs the cheerleader’s healing ability, is he going to get the bad guy’s power too?” And she wasn’t having a heroin-induced vision of the future, as far as I could tell.

Still, the show’s engaging, it always delivers some kind of pay-off (I’m not mad at you, “Lost,” just very, very disappointed), and I don’t know if it’s my imagination, but it seems like the dialogue has gotten less corny and the acting has been bumped up a notch to B-list.

And as cocky as I am, there’s stuff that I’ve been too dense to comprehend. One of my big problems with the show was figuring out what they were going to do with the Niki character. Multiple personality disorder isn’t a super power. It was only while I was reading a message board, trying to find out which hero is going to DIE next week?!? that some fan pointed out what I never picked up on: she’s the Hulk.

I don’t know if that counts as “subtle,” considering that there’s already a She-Hulk. And I’ve heard that a version of the real Hulk’s backstory says that he was created not from gamma radiation but MPD as a result of child abuse. Short of having her screaming “Hulk SMASH!” instead of using long-range rifles, I don’t know how they could’ve made it any clearer.

All we are saying is give Satan a chance

No doubt this story about a woman fined for hanging a peace-sign wreath is going to be making the rounds a lot, but really, it’s just astounding.

I’m not sure what’s most alarming about it:

That the neighbors didn’t recognize it as a peace sign. But then, I have to remember that not everybody lives as close to Berkeley as I do, and they don’t see them as frequently. Maybe we should just be glad they didn’t think it was the Mercedes logo.
That some neighbors used “we have children serving in Iraq” as grounds for their complaint. No, you dipshits, just no. “But my children are serving in Iraq” is supposed to be your knee-jerk response to people protesting the war in Iraq to try and guilt them into shutting up. It’s not for when somebody wishes for an end to war so that your children can come home and pass your damaged moron genes onto their kids.
That the homeowners association president is such a tool. The AP version of the story starts with the guy, Bob Kearns, taking the school principal approach, describing it as if he’d been stuck in a bad situation and was just being fair to all the residents. But towards the end of the story, you see the truth:

Kearns ordered the committee to require Jensen to remove the wreath, but members refused after concluding that it was merely a seasonal symbol that didn’t say anything. Kearns fired all five committee members.

In other words: Kearns is not just your typical idiot who thinks himself a Patriot, but a coward who will enforce his opinion and then hide behind the rules.
That there are still homeowners associations. Yeah, I rent. The whole concept is bizarre to me.

At the risk of getting too earnest here: what the hell, people?

For a couple of years, I’ve been trying to keep up the role of “left-leaning moderate” I’ve assigned myself. Even though I’ll make comments about how the invasion of Iraq was completely unjustified, how Bush is an idiot and Cheney is the harbinger of Hell’s dominion over Earth, and how Fox News and other gross Republican propaganda is twisting and corrupting America into a nation of evil, my heart hasn’t been completely in it. There’s always the voice in the back of my head that’s saying, “Remain objective. Be skeptical of everything. Make sure that you’re not just spouting out mindless left-wing propaganda. There are still intelligent, well-meaning, but misguided people who don’t share your opinions.”

Crap like this just shows that The Dark Side is winning. Until now, every time I’ve seen one of those “Support Our Troops” stickers on the back of a car (okay, an enormous SUV) (and I’ve been to malls in the Atlanta area, so I’ve seen thousands of them), I’ve assumed that the driver of the vehicle and I had roughly the same sentiment, but were looking at it from slightly different sides of the political spectrum. They were saying “Soldiers are risking their lives out of a sense of duty to their country, and we should support them until they get the job done.” I was saying, “Although the war is unjustified, the soldiers’ sense of duty is completely justified, and we should support them and do all we can to bring them home safely.”

Now, I’m saying the same thing, but they’re saying, “Love it or leave it, you Godless pinko San Francisco faggot-hippie.” And the map of the US in my head no longer looks like the simple red state/blue state job we’ve had rammed into our collective subconscious, complete with the well-intentioned-but-simple-minded midwesterners that people like to believe still exist. Instead, it looks like those old propaganda films that show the Red Menace spreading out from Russia and enveloping Europe and Asia. Now it’s a black cloud emanating from Washington and wherever Fox News broadcasts from, twisting people’s minds so completely that they believe peace on earth is something to be frowned upon.

The residents who supposedly complained because their children are serving in Iraq — what the hell are their children serving for, anyway? Is it not so that they can return to the US and watch idiotic television and get fat off too much food and play overly-violent videogames and enjoy all the mind-numbing excess that should come from peace? Or so the people of Iraq can go about their lives in peace without being afraid they’ll be murdered and thrown into a mass grave by their own countrymen? Or so that the Left and the Right can go back to arguing about economic policy and civil rights and marriages and abortions instead of arguing about whether it’s a good thing to go to a politically unstable area and kill people and set off civil wars?

I can understand how the Bush Administration benefits from having an ongoing war with no end in sight; it’s a relatively cheap way to whip up your supporters into patriotic frenzy and keep them too afraid to vote you out of office. But how does your average American benefit from wanting an end to peace?

Roast in a 250 degree oven for 45 minutes, then rub it with a turtle

My regular Saturday Night thing. That’s Pearl Forrester’s turkey recipe from Mystery Science Theater 3000. A post on Rain’s blog reminded me how I used to gather round the VCR on Thanksgiving day, watching or recording as much of the MST3K marathon as I could manage. I had moved on from that profound sense of loss, so thanks to Rain for bringing it back up again.

Even though we can’t watch new episodes anymore, we can try RiffTrax, Mike Nelson’s attempt to ~~exploit his past success~~ re-awaken the magic of MST for us all.

I haven’t tried it yet, but it seems like a good enough idea… AT FIRST. The bad: it’s only one or two guys instead of the whole cast (Bill Corbett and Kevin Murphy make guest appearances), no host segments, and you have to sync up everything by hand. The good: the gang gets to cover modern movies, and Mike at long last gets to do Roadhouse.

Makes a great gift for the person in your life who doesn’t have real-life funny friends to watch movies with.