Theatre: High School Crushed

 Zach by Cristian St. Croix, Directed by Sara Porkalob, ArtsWest through May 28

First, a cranky PSA - We use a vehicle to get to these venues, and I recognize that the folk that live near the theater need their space as well, so I have no prob in paying to park in established lots. But the continual changes in paying for parking is starting to wear on me. Twice now in the past month I've shown up at a regular parking lot to see that the methodology has changed. I've adapted to the whole you-need-a-credit-card-to-park thing, but now you need to have an account with a particular app that you've never heard of before and must download right now if you want to park (and curtain is in 15 minutes). The end result for ArtsWest was that the usual convenient parking slots behind the theater (previously credit-card based, now app-ish) was almost empty last Friday except for a few other people trying to figure out the new method, while the side streets (usually used by the local folk) were packed with people seeking out street parking to avoid the lots. Good going, West Seattle - keep that small-community feel by discouraging outsiders from actually patronizing your restaurants and theaters while making it difficult for your actual denizens.

Sigh. Anyway,

Zach is a satirical comedy based on a 90s teenage sitcom. Being thirty-three in 1990, I didn't get the specific reference at first, but it tickled the back of my brain as the type of after-school sitcom found on the Disney Channel or Nickelodeon in all their cringeworthy glory. Later checking on the Wikipedia pins it down to One Particular teenage sitcom, right down to analogist names and Character Archtypes within the high school ecosystem.

But without such knowledge, you still know what you're getting into, as the play segues between sitcom and realist portrayals. In the sitcom domain, we have the overplayed characters, the bouncy commercial bumpers complete with dance moves, and laugh tracks, but then things change and become darker as we move into a more realistic portrayal of the same universe. Here we're dealing with loss of loved ones, stress, class, race, and gender issues. We switch back and forth between the two universes easily, and for a while I was concerned with how dark it would ultimately go (the 90s were also noted for comedy sketches that would end with someone picking up a chainsaw).

Anyway, our primary protagonists are PJ (kinda dorky but athletic Hispanic kid) and Gina (African-american fashionista), who have been friends forever . Suddenly Zack (white, cis, privileged) arrives on the scene and makes them and their friends into a clique that suddenly clicks, as well as making them his minions for mean-spirited pranks that get other groups in school in trouble. In the sitcom universe, Zach is the merry, beloved prankster. In the real world he's an absolute scumbag that uses his privilege as his carte-blanche to get away with everything. 

It is a play with two actors and over a dozen characters. Michael Nevarez is primarily PJ, and Amber Walker is primarily Gina. The other characters are split between them, with them switching off, playing each other's characters, sometimes passing a character from one actor to the other in a single scene. And they do it effortlessly and naturally, keeping the core of their characters solid so you know who they are (which is a problem I had with The Endless Shift). Both actors are fantastic, capturing both the high energy of the sitcom versions and the more nuanced nature of their real selves. 

The set design is clean and evokes the era of the nineties, with its strong off-primary colors and lightning-bolt shades. St. Croix is owed this because his last play at the ArtsWest, Monsters of the American Cinema, was sabotaged by its own set design. Here it looks like the set of Zoom (which is  a show of an era which I can remember). 

Zach flirts with its darkness, but its ultimate resolution splits the difference between the worlds and resolves them both. Is it worth seeing? Definitely. Even if you have to deal with new, alien parking? Still Definitely. Good actors, good performances, good script. Well done.

More later, 

Your Moment of Zen

Weird how suddenly you think about a song from years and years ago.

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The One with Destiny's Edge

Busy at the moment, but enjoy this.

 More later,

Meanwhile, in Cincinnati

Happy Thanksgiving, all.

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Also Fifty Years Ago

More later,

[The Update: Writing this after seeing the 50th anniversary show and, while it had more loose ends and plot holes than an half-knitted sweater, it was truly a glorious, wonderful thing, the pacing and comparisons between the personal and macro plots weaving together, advancing the character entirely, and both providing a resolution and setting things up for the future. So I'd like to take that egotistic moment and talk about the various incarnations of the Doctor from a personal level. There are none I would truly hate, but a couple places where the entire operation has gone astray. In general, they are a pretty good group.
   One, William Hartnell, was the archetype, and cannot be viewed save by through the black and white glasses of the past. I only saw a handful of his shows, and he plants the flag as the acerbic old professor, the type that every other Doctor plays against to some degree.
   Two, Patrick Troughton, is a bit of a mystery to me, after all these years. I've only seen him in one or two versions (usually the one involving Cybermen), and in his team-ups with later Doctors. More comforting than patriarchal, he has always been one of the "funny" Doctors.
   Three, John Pertwee, was such a creature of his era. The action hero Doctor, working for UNIT, confined to earth, and filled with all the things that made Britain so very British for me. This Doctor, the Avengers, and Monty Python explained what life was like in modern England. With Sarah Jane. And with Autons.
   Four. Ah. You always remember the first Doctor you encounter, and in college, for me, it was Tom Baker, with a long stretch of episodes that we got out of the Chicago public TV station (and yet, whenever I happen to catch one these days, it is always "Giant Robot"). The Bohemian Doctor, with a slew of suitable and increasingly interesting companions - Sarah, K9, Leela, the two Romanas. Yeah, it went silly more often in the later span with Doug Adams, but still, this is the real Doctor to a lot of us.
   Five. Peter Davidson, who was young and vulnerable and we had seen previously in the states as the feckless vet in All Creatures Great and Small. Often bewildered. In one of those wanderings astray, he had a pack of companions at once. Never understood the Adric hate, but I never cared much for Turlough for being the world's oldest schoolboy as well as the continual pawn of evil.
   Six. The Colin Baker Doctor was not a fave at the time, but I am more willing to give this part of the series credit for attempting to be different. A dislikeable Doctor, darker stories, higher body counts, an American companion, more moralizing (often heavy-handed), non-linear storytelling. Yeah, the low point for that era was the Trial of the Time Lord, but C.Baker himself I could not really dislike.
   Seven, with Sylvester McCoy, was a tonic in comparison. Patrick Troughton for the new generation - more elfish and amused with himself. A very comfortable Doctor, and Ace made the best of the later-day companions.
   I fear I never gave Eight, Paul McGann, much of a shot, I'm afraid. An Americanized movie from Fox felt like cultural imperialism, and the shoddy way McCoy was regenerated just left me upset. Yet McGann kept the fires burning on audio and in other media during the dark years without new TV Shows, and I was glad to see that he got a proper sendoff in this clip.
   John Hurt, who is ... The War Doctor? Eight-point-five? The Missing Doctor? Probably he will be the New Nine and everyone else just shifts back one, fits neatly into the cosmology. He fills a required whole admirably, and in the 50th is just spot-on. He pulls off the miracle of walking into everything and making everyone believe he had always been there.
   Chris Eccleston, the Old-Nine-Now-Ten was a perfectly suitable reintroduction to the line. Closer to the Pertwee action hero end of the spectrum, the reboot gave him a dark past without overwhelming him
   David Tennant, Ten-now-Eleven is my personal fave among the new group. Bright and exciting, he was bolstered by good companions with Rose, Martha, and Donna. The stories got a bit much in magical timey-whimey pull-the-solution-out-of-the hat, love-will-find-a-way but he evoked a lot of T.Baker for me. And I liked the glasses. In fact, I think that's one reason I liked the anniversary show so much was his presence.
   Matt Smith rounds out the proper Dozen (nothing to say about Peter Capaldi's Doctor, as we haven't seen much), now that we close in on the end of his tenure, was an OK Doctor for me. His Doctor roiled through manic and clever and confused, and falls in the Peter Davidson era, particularly when he threatens to get overwhelmed by his own companions. River Song comes into her own here, along with the Ponds and now Clara, who stood in very well for the entire line of companions in the 50th.

So, yeah, the 50th Anniversary show is worth catching, even if you've drifted off in the past couple years. It does a good job sealing up a nice little chunk of Whovian History, and continues the team-up tradition of inter-Doctoral bickering. And four of the actors who played Doctor Who were involved in a very amusing, backstage, inside-production comedy right here, and you should check it out. Yeah, a lot of the jokes depend on you knowing about the actors involved, but the sight of Colin Baker standing on his riding lawnmower to get better cellphone reception is just worth it right there, Yeah, go check it out.]

Svengoolie and the New Digital Revolution

On to other matters. I am channel surfing last weekend and encountered Svengoolie playing a horror movie with a side order of bad jokes, and I am surprised, not the least because I am in Seattle and he is part of my Chicago area past.

Clear all Airlanes for the Big Broadcast! (WCUI/Jim Roche)

OK, backing up. Svengoolie, (better called Sven, and played by Rich Koz) is a horror host out of Chicago. I used to watch him on Saturday afternoon on WFLD, which we got up in Lake Geneva, back he was called the Son of Sven (because there was an earlier horror host named Svengoolie and ... yaknow, never mind). This time Sven turned up on ME-TV, which in Seattle is a small reruns station in the upper registers of the cable that showed up about a year ago.

And I got to thinking - where did this station come from, and why am I watching Sven in Seattle?

Part of the answer goes back to when the area (and a lot of other areas) went fully digital and dropped the analog (old rabbit ears) mode of transmission. Now our stations come through cable, with an added fee where it was once free (well, you had to get the antenna, but other than that, it was free, and what you got depended on the strength of the broadcast signal). But the other result of this change was the creation of digital subchannels.

Now this is the cool part. Programming that used to be coming through the airwaves now comes through digitally over the cable line. You don't notice the difference unless something fouls up, and you get this big grainy pixels. But as a result, you can ship a lot more info through the lines. The local broadcasters don't need to use all their bandwidth, and can now create new channels in their allotted spots.

Here's a partial local list - KOMO4, which is ABC, is also THiS Television (showing old movies). KIRO7 is CBS, but is also giving bandwidth to Retro TV (Old TV shows). Channel 12, KVOS is also MeTV (where I found Sven, but also has old TV shows) as well as KVOS2 (which is playing old rock videos), 22 KZJO ("Joe TV" - recent old TV shows) is also Antenna TV (Older TV shows), and while KCFQ (Q13 is Fox), which has Accuweather, but both 22 and Q13 are Tribune stations. the full list is here and contains some interesting connections. Oh, and all the parent channels have HD components as well.

So what do we take away from this? Well, despite the fact that we have more channels, we still see a lot of the same local guys involved in running the stations. But countering that, we see a sudden need for content. Cheap content. So we are seeing small, new, national groups that may turn into the next Nick (remember when they used to run old Dick Van Dyke shows?). So old repeats of "Too Close for Comfort"  and "Peter Gunn" have returned.

And with it, Son of Sven (and Elvira as well, I have discovered in my digging - what's next, Rhonda from "USA Up All Night?")

Now this is the third time that I can point at where this sort of thing has happened (and by "sort of thing" I mean late night, hosted horror movies). Back when stations actually stopped signing off right after the late news every night, there was a demand for content. Late night programming thrived, and with it the Horror Hosts. Then, when we saw the expansion of cable options, we saw another rise, this time of the national movie hosts, the most prominent being Elvira and MST3000. Now, we're in the same place again - we have an increase in ecological broadfcast niches, and old movies (and old television, and music videos) have moved into those niches, like groundcover after a wildfire.

How it all turns out will be interesting, Late night "former broadcast" TV has mostly given way to (even cheaper) infomercials. The plethora of cable channels have gone through repeated material to generating original material. Will these new digital sub-networks create their own evolutionary path, forcing out the early pioneers into yet another incarnation? I dunno, but to be frank, for the moment is is good see Sven again.

More later,

Play: How I Slept With Your Mother

this. by Melissa James Gibson, Directed by Braden Abraham. Seattle Repertory Theatre, through May 15th.

I've said it before, but the good thing about season tickets is that you end up going to plays that you would normally never go to. Billed as an "unromantic comedy", this. (note the period) is more of a sit-com, and by that I want to get back to the full use of the word situational comedy. Humor arising from familiar characters in situations. It is funny in places, touching in others, and well-acted throughout, and would not be out of place on NBC's Thursday night lineup, except for the fact that there is real character development.

The core is the group of friends in their late thirties. Marrell (April Yvette Thompson) and Tom (Hans Altwies) are the brittle, exhausted couple who haven't slept more than fifteen minutes since the birth of their child. Jane (Cheyenne Casebier) and Alan (Nick Garrison) are the old friends from college. Jane's husband died a year ago and she is struggling as a single mom. Alan is the gay jewish wacky friend - in sitcom language, he fills the role of Barney or Phoebe. He gets to be broader and larger than life. Here, his character has perfect memory (making it the second play I've seen at the Rep with such a character, the first being the 39 Stairs). Ryan Shams is the guest star, as Jean-Pierre, the doctor without borders that Marrell and Tom are trying to set up with Jane

That's where it starts, with a party game that goes wrong (Edward Albee is stalking this entire season), and then moves in fits and starts through emotional baggage, hidden secrets, and the nature of relationships. This is New York and these are Urbanites who see plays and do the crossword puzzle in the Times and so there is a lot of wordplay and language and arguing about punctuation and how you pronounce things like a Brita water filter. But the thing is, there is character advancement, and while some of the endings have the traditional feel to them (I have no doubt Alan will be back to normal by next week), there is the feeling of character challenge and growth here.

Contributing the comfortable feel of the play is that there are a lot of Rep regulars here. And that is one of the great things about a Repertory theater - you get do actors in many roles. Han Altwies does the frustrated husband well that we've seen earlier. Cheyenne Casebier digs in a bit deeper with Jane, and the play is ultimately about her. Nick Garrison gets to be more snippy and sniper-like with Alan. Ryan Shams I want to believe is actually French, since his accent and mannerisms line up so well with some of my French friends. And April Yvette Thompson holds her own with the others, and yes, you believe that they have been friends for years even though the discussions veer into race, gender, and morality.

And the set. OK, I'm trying not to hit the "sitcom" hotkey too many times, but the well-furbished set does well as Tom and Marrell's apartment, with the second act scene change as the club Marrell sings in and with various doors for spot scenes. Yes, the components are all there, and the play strives to rise above it all.

One bit of pedantry, from the fact that so much of the play is about words and usage. The cover of the playbill calls the play this (lower case, no punctuation). But title page calls it this. (all lower case, but with a period at the end. And the website gives him This (capped, but no punctuation). So what's the deal with this?

I liked this. Not every play deals with deeper issues, and this. occupies a space higher a tad higher than traditional TV fair and Romantic comedies.  It is a good "date play". More later,

Superbowl Narratives

Oddly enough, as I've moved around the country, I've tended to pick and discard my loyalties for baseball teams but accumulate my loyalties for football clubs. I grew up in Pittsburgh during the time when they were horrible (The big play of the game as deciding which way they would run off the field at the end of the game) and when they were mighty (Franco Harris, Terry Bradshaw, the Immaculate Reception, Myron Cope and the Terrible Towel, etc...). And I lived in Southeastern Wisconsin in a town that literally straddled the line between Bear and Packer territory. And now I live in Seattle. So I can usually count on one of "my" teams getting to the playoffs, and have a good track record of going all the way.

In this case, two teams that I root for made it all the way to the Superbowl. Packers and Steelers. The Packers are a wild-card team that outperformed in the playoffs. The Steelers are continuing their Dynasty with a third Super Bowl under the same QB. And once again I am looking at the narrative behind the game.

I've been here before in rooting for multiple teams and seeing the narrative evolve behind them - Steelers versus Seahawks in Detroit. The narrative at that time swung towards the Steelers - It was rusher Jerome Bettis's last game, in his home town. The Steelers were representing a town of old industry against a town of new tech. Pittsburgh had Primanti Brother Sandwiches, Seattle had Starbucks. Pittsburgh was steelworkers (ignore the diminishing number of mills in the 'burgh), while Seattle was tech support (that is to say, wimps). A national poll showed the Steelers overwhelmingly favored both on the field and in the hearts of America.

And this narrative had an effect - the Steelers got a close call that, years later, the ref said should have gone the other way (hey, thanks guys). The influence of who SHOULD win the game affects the play of the game itself.

This year, the cleated shoe is on the other foot for the Steelers. Far from the favorites, they operate under a cloud. The QB Rothlisberger was suspended for sexual misconduct early in the season, and much of the Pittsburgh narrative has been about how this is the redemption tour. Most folk have already made up their minds, and he and the black and gold have been fitted with the black hat. The attention (and the fan jerseys) have shifted over to number 86, Hines Ward. The Packers, for their part, are the scrappy underdogs this time, ignoring their own great heritage. Their QB is there for the first time, and they have their future ahead of them.

The end result? The Steelers should be heavy favorites but there is only a spread of a couple points, and national opinion polls give the game to the Packers. Will this spill out on the field in the officiating? Into the broadcast booth in the calling of the game? Seahawk fans know about this type of pain.

Then there is the political aspect. The President was a big supporter of the Steelers two years previously, and owner Dan Rooney was made Ambassador to Ireland. The game is on Fox with a big celebration of Ronald Reagan's 100th Birthday (come on, guys, the Republicans need their own FDR/Kennedy legend, even if they have to build it themselves). So, ignoring that Wisconsin has been a "blue" state, is there a political polarization to the game?

And finally, for those who are going to watch for the commercials, here is what I am predicting - Dead Celebrities, Animal Attacks, and teaser commercials that tell you to go to a website for a punchline. Because nothing claims the dominance of a media like ads that send you to a completely different media.

Am I calling the game one way or another? I'm no fool. I have good friends on both sides of line this time. I'm just going to enjoy it, knowing that by the end of the day, one of "my" teams is going to win. And that works out well for me.

More later,

Animaniacs

Kind of busy right now, but I had to share this, liberated from Andrew Sullivan's site:



More later,

The Triumph of Intellect and Romance

OK, I was going to post something else here, but this just completely boggled me.



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Fifteen Influences

So I promoted the "15 Games" meme, and following it around, found one guy who talked about the fifteen things that influenced him. And that was a different question than the 15 games, so I started to put together a list of influences (though it took more than 15 minutes to put together - memory being what it is).

I concentrated on things that influenced be before I started writing professionally. Everything influences to some degree, but I looked at the foundation material, so it is all pre-1980. Here's my list.

Lord of the Rings/Hobbit - Makes sense, in that the massive infodumps of the intros and appendixes, not to mention "The Shadow of the Past" all were foundations in the art of worldbuilding. That influence does not extend to the Simarillion - I had moved on to other things by the time that came out, and while I read it, it felt dry compared to the previous books. But all of the above (and Tolkien's short fiction) got me in gear with Tolkein's idea of "Subcreation" - as we are created things, so too do we create.

The Bible - The Bible comes in at all sorts of odd angles - Bible as Moral Operating System (Gospels), Bible as Historical Record (Pentateuch), and Bible as Science Fiction (Revelation of John, Ezekiel seeing the Wheels). The DL Gods came from my gods who took their name from Rev Barker's book Everyone in the Bible.

Silent Planet Trilogy - OK, you read the four Tolkien books out, what is next? Written by fellow Inkling CS Lewis, the trilogy that starts with Out of the Silent Planet is science fantasy (oddly, never embraced Narnia). My original campaign Toril (whose the name later went to the Forgotten Realms' planet) was originally called Torilandra.

Face In the Frost - As book about wizards, again in the era where anything with magic in it was billed as "In the Tradition of Lord of the Rings". It think it gave me a lot of thought about people who were inside the "profession" as it were, where the profession was magic.

Emerson Lake and Palmer - Listened to this a lot in college - call it Anthem Rock or Arena Rock or Progressive Rock, ELP and Yes and Genesis (Pre-Phil Collins) and Led Zep were all influences. Oh, and the Roger Dean covers as well for Yes!

Harlan Ellison - Found the original Dangerous Visions in the school library in the early seventies, and it pretty much blew my mind for alternate views and showing the SF could be more than Asimov and Analog. In early college, most of Ellison's oeuvre was still in print, so I got to load up. He was a master of the first line and the last line of a story (and a rival for Arthur C. Clarke for that last line stinger). I always credited Ellison with the idea that the gods need worshipers more than vice versa.

2001: A Space Odyssey -Speaking of Clarke. Not the movie (saw it years later in college), but the Clarke "adaptation" which grounded in to me the idea of unexplainable aliens and mankind's possible place in the universe.

The Raven - Not the Poe, but Roger Corman's brilliant adaptation that ignored everything from the original poem but the name. Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre, Vincent Price, and a young Jack Nicholson. The wizard duel at the end pretty much set a LOT of D&D spellls (No, go look). I watched it on "Chiller Theater" - late night Pittsburgh TV with Chilly Billy Cardille(y).

Sword in The Stone - The Disney movie - another piece that kept with me was the whole Merlin/Morgan polymorph duel. Not much else, but that just was brilliant.

Fafhrd and Grey Mouser - Another discovery in early college, set up the whole idea of the urban fantasy (That is to say, a city in a fantasy world). Loved the early works, though the later stuff, sadly, ventured into softcore porn.

Connections - James Burke's series was influential in the idea that everything needs to fit together, though not in the fashion you might think. His pinball delivery and hands-on example was pure science history porn. I thought it was earlier in my life, but actually showed up in 1979 in the states.

Earthsea - Another book that was "In the Tradition of Tolkien" - no it wasn't, but it was short and pognient and concentrated on moral decisions as opposed to explaning everything. Again, the first three were my base.

Omniverse - A fanzine (!) by Mark Gruenwald that pulled together the various earths of DC and Marvel and started for me the idea of continuity through multiple products and issues. In the ages before the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, this was the coolness. Add to that the old Marvel Team-Ups and Marvel Two-in-Ones and you have the basis for the nascent comic book campaign that became the Marvel Super Heroes game.

Roy Thomas's Conan stories - While on the subject of comics - Never read the Howard originals - they did nothing for me, even with the Franzetta covers of the age. Instead I found myself attracted to the B&W versions of the stories. John Buscema's Conan (and Frank Thorne's Red Sonjas) defined those characters in a way that broke canon, and most people don't even care (and yeah, the Wikipedia notes that these guys were not the first to protray these looks, but they were the definitive appearances when I was young).

The Early Steampunk Movies - The Great Race, Those Magnifient Men in the Flying Machines, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Around the World in 80 Days. Heck, even Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Steampunk before Steampunk was cool.Amazing how many of these were done decades before the entire "goggles as fashion statement" era of today. Of the group, The Great Race is probably the best - Tony Curtis, Natalie Wood, Jack Lemmon, and Peter Falk as Max, as in "Max! Press the Button!" (a major tagline of my earler campaign.

There are more - the Princes in Amber, Elfquest, Cerebus, Monty Python as well as stuff that didn't impact me - Lovecraft showed up late for the party, and though I loved Bradbury, I felt closer to Malacandra than Mars (and John Carter didn't show up at all).

More later,

More later,

Retro-Who

RPGPundit, down in Uraguay, came up with a link to this:



And I will see him and raise him THIS



Busy now. More later,

Olympics

I've spent the past few days wrestling with a nasty headcold, which has manifested with an ever-rotating cascade of symptoms like a demonically-possessed Simon game (Today - sore throat! Tomorrow - uncontrollable coughing!).

And worst of all, when I'm sick like this, I sing. Badly. And not good songs, either, usually bits of doggerel made up on the spot, or things like the Donny Most song from that Family Guy episode:

Donny Most, Donny Most

He was "Ralph" on Happy Days

Donny Most, Donny Most

Now he rises from the haze.

So its not a good idea for me to be around others, and I've been working at home for the past couple days. Now, the fact that this coincides with the Olympics, which are being broadcast by the network nation of NBC, is completely beside the point. So the fact I can curl up and let the TV run while I slurp down hot tea and review manuscripts is totally a small bonus.

As you've probably heard, it has been a snakebit Olympics. Warm weather. Tough venues. A fatality in the luge. Protesters. Breakdowns in equipment and transportation. The torch trapped behind a chain link fence like it was in Free Speech Zone. Still, it is the Winter Olympics, and I've always liked the Winter Games more than the Summer. Skiing, speedskating, hey, I'll even watch figure skating. And adding the polar cold-weather opposites of curling and snowboarding just adds icing to the cake.

And I've been happy with the coverage. One of the grumbles in Seattle right now is that we get the games in the evening NBC feed instead of live. Vancouver is two hours away (plus an hour at the border) - why are we getting everything on tape delay. Me? I'm glad I don't have to watch the announcers fill time for two hours while the IOC Judges are on the women's alpine course praying for snow, or waiting for the fog to lift so you can see the top of the course from the bottom.

As much as I bash on large corporatism, the network nation of NBC has done a good job so far - highlights in the evening in prime, and live/semi-live events during the day on CNBC, MSNBC, and USA. And while they cut some of the action (like the opening rocks for curling each end), they have been showing full games (which is just as well, since the US team is 0-3 in the round robin and not looking at all well - will there still be coverage when the US is no longer a contender?). In addition, NBC has eschewed the mawkish sentimentality and jingoism that often haunts Olympic coverage.

So for the moment I've got my laptop, manuscript, blanket, and tea, and I'm happy the Olympics are on - because otherwise the only thing on TV would be reruns of "Phineas and Ferb".

Donny Most, Donny Most

Sunday Monday, Happy Days.

More later.

Nerdcore

John "That PC Guy" Hodgman at the Radio & TV Correspondents Dinner.

More later,

A Simpson's Dream

I've stated before that I believe our dreams to be messy emotional states, and that what we call dreams to be an attempt to impose order onto that messy state. And yet the other night I dreamed an entire episode of the Simpsons. In the traditional three-act arc. No opening couch gag, though.

Here's the story: Bart and the other kids are playing space ships (The Simpsons universe is oddly retro – there are hoboes and references to the Rat Pack in it). There have been stories of UFOs around Springfield. Bart takes a tumble. Martin, the class nerd, shows up with a working space ship, inspiring the others to come up with their own working versions as well. Ralph has one that works on the principle of two pie plates banging together. The cool thing is, they all work, and they go looking for UFOs. They are attacked by aliens. We don’t see the aliens, but Bart is captured and put into suspended animation by the Alien’s Minions – Ned and Skinner.

Bart wakes up and all the other kids have grown into their parents or adult analogs. Ralph is a cop, Nelson is Snake, the creepy twins have become Marge's sisters. Lisa is an adult with Marge-style hair. Maggie is a sullen rebel. The world is surviving but post-apocalypse, in the fashion of an old Twilight Zone episode with the old man in the mountain. Lisa says that the aliens did this, but since she was the most adult, she weathered it better. Maggie sends Bart to the mountain, where the old man giving out all the wisdom is … Homer.

Bart leads Homer back down into the city, and Lisa is angry – she’s been using Homer as a false god to keep everyone in check under the aliens. The former kids rebel but Martin (now Professor Frinke) finds a way to send Bart back in time to prevent the aliens from succeeding – don’t call attention to yourselves with the flying ships. As he heads back, Maggie whispers something in Bart's ear.

Bart returns from after he takes his tumble. He belittles playing spaceships, and everyone goes and does something else. The exception is Martin and Ralph, who fly off in Ralph’s pie-plate craft. We see them head off, and they are followed by a space ship. Bart remembers what Maggie whispered to him - "There are no aliens - we become adults eventually regardless."

Over the closing credits, Kang and Kodos appears, to gloat that they finally appear in continuity on the show. Kang points out that the future may have changed, and besides, they only are seen in the closing tag, which gets cut in syndication. Kodos screams “nnooooo!”.

And I woke up, the plot fully-formed in my head, but as I tried to remember it, I was aware I was making linkages and explanations and filling plot holes. Now the only question is: How do I make a pitch?

More later,

Leave it to the Times

Apparently it is Assistant Editor's Month over at the Seattle Times, at least as far as Monday's editorial page is concerned. In addition to the usual rip-and-print syndicated conservatives like Goldberg and Krauthammer (whose headshot appears next to the Webster's definition of "smug"), they ran a "Doonesbury Flashback". Sorry, make that a "Flasback" - as they typoed their way through their own titles.

But the utter weirdity of the day was this little bit of strangeness, keying on the news that Ken Osmond, the actor who played Eddie Haskell in Leave it to Beaver, is suing the Screen Actor's Guild for undistributed royalties. The most complete story I found on this was here from the Hollywood Reporter, which lays out that Osmond has previously sued the Director's and Writer's Guilds (still pending) and that this is a preliminary motion to a class action suit, and it is based on the argument that SAG and others have collected foreign royalties on the actor's behalf and have not distributed them.

And given the, shall we say, plastic nature of accounting in creative fields (where more imagination goes into contractual interpretations than onto the screen), the idea that SAG may have undistributed change laying around is a strong possibility. And given that part of this is SAG resisting an independent audit makes it increasingly likely. So this is all business, right?

Not as far as the Times is concerned. Since Osmond played a snaky character fifty years ago (and for those who are too young, Eddie Haskell was the Beave's older brother's best friend and general bad influence who was very polite to authority figures, who in turn saw right through his unctuous ways), the Times gets all snarky and mocking on him. The thing is, this was the CHARACTER, not the actor. The actor went on, did other things, and became police officer. But the editorial is not "How dare a police officer challenge Hollywood Accounting" but rather "Oh, there goes Eddie Haskell". They've totally pitched into TV Land.

Is Ken Osmond on the up-and-up? Is his suit valid? There's a court for that to decide. But it will be based on contract and law, not on the actor's character fifty years before. Of course, given the media's inability to separate Fred Thompson from his character on Law & Order, this may be more rule than exception.

But the funny thing is, I always thought all the recreational drug use was at the Stranger. Apparently they're spending their Sunday afternoons on something over at the Times as well.

More later,

Totally Spies

So let's talk about surveillance. And by surveillance I'm not talking about our government's penchant for turning more and more cameras and microphones on its own people, such that, starting at the beginning of next month, they now take requests from local governments to swing the satellite cams around to snoop on US (because, unlike the terrorists, the government DOES know where we are, which, I guess, makes it the easier task to tune in).

No, I'm not talking about Big Brother. I'm talking about the latest tool for Little Brother.

I'm watching the tube and I've seen a couple ads for different types what is being billed as "directional hearing aids". The commercials go along the line that you, the hard-of-hearing consumer, don't want to be a bother to others by insisting on turning up the TV, or asking people to repeat themselves, or missing lines at the movie. How much easier would it be if you had a pointable hearing aid that could pick up just what you wanted to hear.

Sounds good? But then there's always that little "bonus" they include in these ads- you can hear neighbors across the street, or find out that your granddaughter is preparing a surprise party.

Or, say, hang out at coffee shop and just eavesdrop on your unsuspecting neighbors. They don't say that, but I am.

So I am of two minds of this on this development. Cyberpunk is supposedly where technology meets the street, and something like this bit of mirrorshade tech would be a boon to snoops everywhere. And there is no law against overhearing a conversation. And maybe it will be used to head off a couple robberies or murders. Concerned citizens in action and all that. Until some politico gets caught in an off-mike moment and THEN we see all manner of laws coming down. That's one thought.

The other is a movie idea for a higher-tech Rear Window, one which might star Valerie Bertinelli and be on Lifetime. A woman who is losing her hearing gets one of these little gems as a gift, then quickly starts using it to dip into everyone else's business. Sort of gives her a little superpower that makes her feel more up on things, able to keep up with the grandkids, get the juicy gossip. Then she overhears a murder being planned.

And of course, if its Lifetime, she goes to the cops, finds the Head Detective is extremely attractive and separated from his wife, then discovers that the murder being arranged is for the Head Detective's wife, and now she is a witness and the Head Detective is coming for her, and she defeats him by pushing him off a lighthouse, but nevermind about that. The point is that this is surveillance society moved to the street level, both in fiction and real life.

And Little Brother may be more motivated to act on your foibles than Big Brother.

More later,

Pötterdämmerung

So, it was a very quiet weekend at Grubb Street, mainly because the latest and last Harry Potter book arrived Saturday morning, and with the exception of her Saturday afternoon gaming group, the Lovely Bride was face-down in the text for the bulk of the weekend.

Which made things quiet. Creepy quiet. I sat on the back porch, reading. I worked on finishing projects (An essay in galleys, in-game text for The Settlers, a proposed article). I watched TV, which I rarely do. That included a marathon for "Who Will Be The Next Food Network Star?" (Don't care much for reality shows, but add cooking and I am SO there) and a TBSed version of "Sin City" (Note: Frank Miller no longer writes comic books - he just publishes his storyboards). But it was weirdly, strangely quiet in the household.

Mind you, I have not read any of the books, though I have been following along in the movies, and the LB has kept me up to date with the status and the "deep geek" moments (I tell her about the O'Brian novels, so it's a fair trade). But this weekend I have been avoiding a lot of the Internet, just to avoid everyone who was issuing spoilers, or even non-spoiler spoilers ("Well, it ended the way I expected it to" IS a spoiler if you've previously offered your opinions).

It ends a twelve year run for the series, and I am buckling down for the inevitable "Now that HP is gone, the book business will crash" (Like it's been in raring good health so far) and the inevitable search for the Next Young Adult Novel Star.

Hmmm - maybe they could do a reality show on that ....

More later,