Decembrion In Excelsis

As the end of every year draws near (well, ends of 2013 and 2014 and 2015, at least) I compile a very eclectic and personal list of pop culture superlatives. Often this has more to do with my experience with the entertainment in question than the objective quality of same, but that is kind of the whole raison de blog 'round here. So without further ado, the 2016 Year-End Countdown Something Or Other!

1. Best visual pun Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. OK, stay with me on this one. This summer I picked up the first collection of a newish comic book series, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. It is a dark reimagining of the beloved Archie character Sabrina the Teenage Witch, done as overt horror assuming that Sabrina's family heritage of witchcraft involves actual demon worship and ritual human sacrifice and whatnot. It is a HOOT. It's not played for laughs, it's legitimately creepy and pretty far from camp. But there's still an inherent humor to it simply by nature of the premise, taking this innocuous character orginially presented in bright colors with rounded edges and pushing it into nightmare territory, and incongruous juxtaposition which can certainly produce a chuckle or two when things go really over the top. And furthermore, it's all done as a period piece, which allows for certain amusing, historically 20/20 social commentary as well. Quite a bit of the art is at least photo-referenced, using celebrity archetypes from the late 50's and early 60's to drive the point home. So ultimately this leads to a great joke when the characters of Betty and Veronica show up.

And, see, Veronica is a brunette so she gets modeled after a very famous brunette pin-up, with her square cut bangs as a dead giveaway: Bettie Page. Whereas Betty, with the waves in her blonde hair, looks like she's being drawn as an homage to ... Veronica Lake. So Betty is Veronica and Veronica is Bettie! OK, I thought it was funny.

2. Best late bandwagoning (second annual!) Orange Is the New Black. Right about the time that Orange Is the New Black was releasing its most recent season my wife and I decided to finally give it a try. And at this point, really, what is there to say? It's pretty great! We did our version of binge-watching, which means we would watch one episode per night every night, as long as we were home and neither of us was too exhausted and there wasn't something else, like a live sporting event, that we needed to watch more urgently. Some nights we would watch two episodes back-to-back, if we were feeling particularly wild.

We paused after the third season, in an effort to savor the fourth. I know that there are three additional seasons more or less guaranteed, which is great, but of course what will probably happen is that Season 5 will be released right on top of the premiere of Game of Thrones Season 7, #firstworldproblems. (In fact, one reason why we paused OINTB was to re-watch GoT Season 6 when our Blu-ray copy was delivered. Now as we wait to get back to Westeros, we can amble back to Litchfield for a spell, #fantasyworldproblems.)

3. Most problematic recommendation Jessica Jones. See the post from earlier this week for the full explanation as to why I really dug Jessica Jones but find it hard to impress upon other people that they should watch it.

4. Most depressing thing I read The Sun and the Moon. OK, as long as I've re-opened the unhappy box, let me go ahead and get this one out of the way, too. The Sun and the Moon is a fantastic book! It covers a specific moment in American history, basically the summer of 1835 (although it does provide quite a bit of backstory as well), to tell the tale of the rise of city newspapers as a truly populist mass medium, as opposed to a luxury for the upper merchant class. It delves into early 19th century sensationalism, scandals and crime reporting and whatnot, but ultimately explores the production and reception of a series of articles purporting to be authentic scientific discoveries of lifeforms and civilizations on the moon observed by new telescopes. This, of course, was pure science fiction, but well-crafted and presented to stand on its own in such a way that many people believed the hoax until it was revealed to be just that. Along the way the story loops in various American luminaries, several of whom are near and dear to my heart, including P.T. Barnum and Edgar Allen Poe.

So is it depressing to read about people's gullibility? Not really, no, at least not with respect to whether or not winged furry humanoids called Lunarians really exist. What gave me the blues was the fact that the book identified another facet of the ascent of daily newspapers, which served as political mouthpieces often with unapologetically brazen agendas. And in 1835, one of the hot-button political issues in the U.S. was slavery. What was depressing was reading some of the arguments for and against slavery which went back and forth in the pages of the papers. Pro-slavery voices often fell back on the Bible to justify the practice. Abolitionists often pointed out that there are lots of things in the Bible which weren't done anymore, and cherry picking chapters and verses to rationalize crimes against humanity is really not a particularly satisfying answer. This of course went round and round and changed very few minds and accomplished very little, and then we had a bloody war about it to settle things. It's my own fault, really, that like many modern people I think any given phenomenon is something new and unique to our slice of history. And so I was blindsided by this idea that people holding up the Bible to justify trampling others' rights, and people pointing out how inconsistent and hypocritical that was, and people continuing to trample while jamming Bibles in their ears and chanting "Bible! Bible! Bible!" was actually a good hundred and eighty years old. I like to believe things do get better as life goes on, but sometimes I wonder.

5. Biggest missed opportunity Charles Dance as the big bad of the Monsterverse. Right, now, let's talk about stupid monster movies! We added HBO to our cable package some time ago (2014, maybe?) and I often find myself comparing the experience of having it now as a middle-aged parent, after a long stretch where I didn't have it, to back when I was a kid and HBO was one of many perks of living in my parents' house. One of the biggest differences is that, as a child, I often would be flipping around the tv channels, bored, hit HBO to find that a movie had just started, and wind up watching the whole thing. This almost never happens as an adult, for reasons which I assume should be obvious. But it did happen once this past year. My wife and I settled onto the couch after getting the kids to bed, there was nothing we were in the midst of slow-bingeing (see above), and my wife only wanted the tv on as background noise anyway (she had paperwork to do). So I stumbled upon Dracula Untold on HBO and gave it a few minutes; I remembered it had more or less flopped but I wanted to see if it was "so bad it's good" or merely sub-mediocre.

I ended up watching most of it, and I have to say, it might not be much above mediocre, but it's certainly not sub. I admire the ambition of the filmmakers, turning Vlad into this scary-yet-sympathetic-yet-still-really-evil tragic protagonist. They Batmanned the hell out of him, and Luke Evans works with what he's given. Moreover, you might (read: you probably don't) recall that Universal was trying to breed their own cash cow mega-franchise, wherein they would do origin stories for the classic monsters like Dracula and Frankenstein and the Wolfman and the mummy, and then bring them together MCU Avengers-style for a billion dollar blockbuster. Batmanization notwithstanding, turning monsters into superheroes is a bit of a stretch, and announcing the intent ahead of time just seemed like hubris and probably had people rooting for them to fail, but for what it's worth, again, I will not personally crap on someone for aiming too high.

And then there's Undead Tywin Lannister! I had a vague recollection that Charles Dance was in Dracula Untold, and indeed he is, as the ancient vampire who transforms Vlad Tepes, a perfectly good use of Dance's ice cold bastard persona. What I did not know, until I got sucked into the flick and suddenly two hours later found myself watching the epilogue which apparently woudl have set up the modern day crossover, was that Dance was going to be the primary antagonist, being just as immortal as Dracula and having followed him into the present ready to make his life hell. That would have been great! A movie where Dracula, the ghost of Frankenstein, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon have to save the world that fears and despises them might have been dumb as all get-out, but if it had included sufficient supervillain scenery chewing by Charles Dance, I would have been there full price on opening night! Alas, it seems this potential was squandered by middling box office returns. Oh, what could have been.

6. Most surprising use of Netflix stand-up specials. For a long, looooooooong time, way past the period when everyone else shifted over to the streaming model, my Netflix account was used to rent physical DVDs by mail. If you are a long time reader of this blog, you know that's because for years I rode the train and often watched movies or tv shows on the commute, using a portable DVD player and discs, because the rails went through some terrain that didn't have reliable cell coverage and the train didn't have WiFi and blah blah blah. I have since come around and gotten the streaming version myself. But if you had told me, back in 2010 or so, that one of the best uses I would get out of the in-home streaming service was the ability to order up a stand-up comedy special any time I wanted, particularly when my wife and I needed a break from scripted dramas and such, I would have found that pronouncement ... odd. Not unbelievable, I've always really liked stand-up comedy, just not the knee-jerk assumption I would have made. Nevertheless, here we are, and after watching a few online series (in addition to OINTB, we loved Kimmy Schmidt and Stranger Things) and several on-demand movies, the fact that we streamed Aziz Ansari and Ali Wong and Bo Burnham and Jen Kirkman and Donald Glover doing killer comedy is like this crazy bonus jar of funny cherries on top.

7. Best new media audio books of memoirs written by comedians and read by the comedians themselves. Speaking of comedy, 2016 was also the year that I finally gave in to the recorded siren call of audiobooks. I had been of the firm opinion that audiobooks simply don't count, by which I mean of course that everything in my life is some kind of running tally which translates quantifiably into a sense of accomplishment: how many blog posts I make, how many hits my blog gets (obviously I got over both of those this year, too), how many classic movies I've seen (hence my 1001 Movie Blog Club experiment), how many books I've read in a given year (thank you, GoodReads). Reading, to me, feels like an active mental undertaking, while listening to an audiobook seems like more of a passive thing which I wouldn't deserve too much (if any) credit for .

But things change. I don't take a train to work anymore, I drive, and the state police really frown on people reading books while operating a motor vehicle, even in the stop-and-go bumper-to-bumper traffic of peak rush hour I-66! I even went on a few work-related trips this year, and had to drive myself from Virginia to New Jersey and back one weekend. It was on that trip that I decided to finally make use of this Audible membership with monthly free credits I apparently get with my Amazon Prime account. So I downloaded Patton Oswalt's Silver Screen Fiend to my phone and listened to it while driving the leg home, and it was enjoyable enough that it unleashed a flood. (It helps that the radio in my car is totally dead, so it's the apps on my phone or dead silence for those two hours out of every day I'm behind the wheel.) I figured if I'm going to start listening to audiobooks regularly I ought to impose totally arbitrary limits on my consumption! Okay, not really, but I did like that Patton recorded himself reading his own book, because it guaranteed that all the jokes would at least be delivered as intended, and it was kind of like listening to a comedy album, something I assuredly have never had a problem with. I tried, and am still trying, to break things up with an audio novel read by a professional vocal narrator artist type every so often, but mostly I gorged on comedians performing their memoirs: Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Nick Offerman, Aisha Tyler, Jenny Lawson. Really I've found that it's kind of like going on a road trip with someone cool and funny riding shotgun, where the agreed upon division of labor is that I'll do all the driving if they just tell me entertaining stories from their life.

8. Most exciting yet unsettling development the little guy getting ahead of me on Clone Wars. Star Wars has gotten its clutches into my kids in a big way, most especially the little guy, who is now eight years old and absolutely the prime age for it. And of course I am thrilled about this development. I've found myself softening quite a bit on the prequels, because my kids really dig them. The bino (he's three) thinks Jar Jar Binks is funny, thus settling the age-old question as to whether Jar Jar is in fact designed to appeal to children or fails at that and is simply universally reviled, and the little guy really likes the whole Jedi Order and seeing them at the center of the story rather than as abstract background information.

It is strange, in its way, that the little guy is growing up with a different version of what is canon than I had. I had the original trilogy all on its own for a while, although that was fleshed out in little bits here and there by Star Wars comics, novels, role-playing games, video games, and the like. Then came the prequels, which were a mixed bag to adult sensibilities, and then a ton more comics and games and novels and Wookieepedia ... and then Disney bought Lucasfilm and said a lot of that Expanded Universe stuff no longer counted, but also gave us the very good Force Awakens. But before that, I had really kind of drifted away from trying to experience and understand everything about Star Wars. It felt like diminishing returns; the let-down of Episodes I through III predisposed me to think that any further attempts to wring more story out of that particular galaxy was not worth the effort.

Case in point: years ago my sister gave me a DVD for Christmas which was the pilot movie of the Clone Wars tv series. And every year I told myself I should make time to watch it, and every year I failed to do so, and it just sat on my bookshelf, still shrinkwrapped and collecting dust. Then my kids watched all six Star Wars movies and were still hungry for more and I figured, why not let them watch Clone Wars? At that point I had heard good things about Clone Wars, that out of all the ancilliary tie-ins it was definitely at the top end, quality-wise. My own reasons for never breaking the seal had shifted from "eh, I've got better things to do than be disappointed in Star Wars some more" to "I just don't have the free time to invest in this no matter how good it is" but that's not a problem my kids share. Sure enough, they liked the movie and so started watching the series (which, cybersaints be praised, is available in its entirety on Netflix). This is all well and good, except that at this point the little guy has watched something like 38 episodes of the show and I've never seen a single one. He now considers Ziro the Hutt and Captain Rex and Luminara Unduli and Cad Bane big parts of the canon. Technically he knows more about Star Wars than I do! Which makes me happy and proud but also the slightest bit wistful. Passing torches is good, but my torch-hand now feels conspicuously empty. I suppose it's all just part of the whole parenting gig.

9. Best movie-going experience Keanu. When I started compiling notes for this post (months ago, obvs.) I had more or less assumed that this slot would be dedicated to taking the little guy to see Rogue One in the theater. Not only does it tie in nicely to the previous entry, but it raises an interesting tidbit: the little guy has never seen any Star Wars movie on the big screen! He turned down an invitation to see Force Awakens at a theater, but he's a year older now and I do believe he's ready. Or, I did believe. Here's the current logistical considerations: I personally haven't gotten to see Rogue One yet. And since Christmas is about two and half days away, I probably won't until next week. At which point I will see it with my wife, while the kids are at daycare, because Rogue One is rated PG-13 and that at a minimum calls for a pre-screening by both parents to ascertain whether or not we are comfortable with the eight-year-old seeing it. Assuming it passes that test, I can then think about scheduling a father-son outing, but for all I know that might not come together until some time in early January, and this list is supposed to be all about 2016, soooo ...

Keanu was really good! I went into it with fairly low expectations, just bound and determined to support Key and Peele because I loved their sketch show so much. My wife did, too, so it was an ideal date movie (except that it didn't feature any sandal-wearing emo heroes with ripped abs - I'm not going to link to the old posts explaining why that's a running joke, just trust me, I'm hilarious). And we continue to love the local Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, so here, take my money, give some of it to Jordan and Keegan-Michael, and bring me your finest beer and chicken wings. The fact that the movie was LOL-funny was a welcome addition to the overall enjoyment.

10. Mea Culpas I can't think of any other highlights in my year of pop culture, so I'll close with the other things, like Rogue One, which were never in contention for this list because I just didn't get around to them. This year I got into Breaking Bad, but only through Season 1 and a little bit into Season 2, so I understand I still have the best parts ahead of me. I failed to catch Season 2 of Agent Carter, or Season 1 of Preacher, and I gave up on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. I DVR'ed Thor: The Dark World, watched half of it, but have yet to finish it, so that remains the one flick in the MCU I've never seen. I really wanted to see Park Chan-wook's The Handmaiden in the theater, but it got a very limited release and never came to my local Alamo, so I'll have to VOD it at some point. I started reading Justin Cronin's The Twelve about six months ago but never finished it, because I designated it my "read while I'm working out on the elliptical or treadmill" book and, oh man, have I been bad about working out lately. That's a whole 'nother story. (It's a short one, though: I'm lazy AF.) There remains to this day a tiny part of me that longs for an injury or illness which would force me to be on bedrest for three or four weeks, during which time I could read and write and watch tv and movies and just generally have minimal responsibilities and maximal free time. I know that's ridiculous, both because I clearly have a lot of free time to enjoy a lot of things I like, as this post demonstrates, and there are countless scads of people less fortunate than I am in that regard, not to mention the fact that the very responsibilities to which I refer are primarily my wife, my kids, and my cool new job, all of which by an honest accounting make me very happy!

So instead I will simply content myself with having made it to the end of another year, knowing that I have a whole brand new year to look forward to. I will doubtless read more books, see more shows, go to more movies, and do lots of other stimulating, worthwhile things, and I am truly grateful for that. It may not come all at once, and it may in fact come in tiny fits and spurts around the edges of a very full life, but I will never actively complain about that, either.

Line Reading of the Year

In this era of interweb content churn, amidst the current golden age of television, there’s no shortage of people online overanalyzing pop culture and looking for deeper meaning, attempting to isolate and identify the ultimate microcosmic encapsulations of the present moment. And who am I to deny myself the chance to take a stab of my own? Spoilers follow for one of my favorite pieces of entertainment of the past twelve months, Jessica Jones.

(Note: spoiler for the post itself, this is gonna get dark, as I’m sure you can imagine and won’t be surprised by if you’ve already seen Jessica Jones. But on the chance that you haven’t seen but want to hear my thoughts anyway, consider yourself forewarned. Later this week I will do my usual hilarious rundown of superlatives for 2016, if you’d rather read something lighter!)

Jessica Jones was so great in so many ways, and I’m going to drill down with hyperspecific focus on a single one of those elements because of its particular resonance, but I don’t want to give the impression that’s the only good thing about the show. The acting was terrific, especially Krysten Ritter as Jessica but not discounting the entire supporting cast, and the storyline was awesome because it was so different from the usual superhero fare, and the direction was on point and the music was perfect, etc. etc. etc. If you blew past the spoiler warning above despite not having seen the series, seriously, do yourself a favor and watch it.

Although (and here, as we get a little closer to the eventual point of this post, we start to acknowledge how complicated it is to engage with Jessica Jones as a whole) at the same time that I recommend the show so highly there is a major caveat, which is that the emotional heart of the show is really fairly brutal. Jessica Jones takes place in a comic book universe and is ostensibly the tale of a former-and-maybe-once-again super-heroine and her evil arch-nemesis, but that’s a superficial read. What it’s really about is trauma, surviving it and coping with it, or at times spectacularly failing to cope with it well. It’s a superhero story where we come in fairly late in the game and get a lot of info via flashback and exposition-laden monologues, but what’s in the past includes the super-villain getting the best of the heroine in profoundly disturbing fashion for a long time, and the heroine ultimately emerging victorious but at tremendous personal cost. And then, as the series begins, we learn that even that previous defeat of the bad guy might not have been as complete and total as one would hope.

The bad guy in question is a man called Kilgrave, played by David Tennant. He absolutely slays in this role, pun only semi-intended. (I am not a Doctor Who fan - nothing against that venerable franchise, I just never got into it and now it seems like a daunting, enormous timesink I honestly do not have the spare time for. But I am aware of Doctor Who, and aware of its fandom, and aware that Tennant played one of the incarnations of The Doctor. I’m further aware that some DW fans very vocally freaked right the heck out over Tennant as Kilgrave because how dare any silly superhero show sully the good image of The Doctor by portraying him as an unsympathetic irredeemable sociopath? Apparently these people do not understand that actors sometimes take on different roles which are not intended to be commentaries upon one another. Arguably I could have written an entire post about fan entitlement, but that’s not what I’m here to talk about today.) Kilgrave’s whole superpowered deal is that he can control the minds and actions of others simply by speaking to them; if he says “give me your wallet” the person he says it to will happily comply, and if he says “take this gun, put the barrel in your mouth and blow your brains out” the person will just as happily do exactly what he says. He’s utterly amoral and completely insidious and basically unstoppable and Jessica got away from him the first time because he stepped into the street without looking both ways and got hit by a bus. Jessica thought he died in that accident, but it turns out she was wrong. The series hinges on Kilgrave’s return, and his obsession with Jessica and how she deals with all of that.

The show, to its credit, does not shy away from how gross Kilgrave is. It is at times profoundly uncomfortable to watch him move through the world, constantly violating the lives of others. He knocks on strangers’ doors and tells them to invite him in, feed him the dinner they were preparing for their family, let him sit at the head of the table. And they do it. When people make him angry, he tells them to hurt themselves. And they do it. If you have an ounce of empathy, it’s unsettling. Then there’s the sex angle, because let’s be honest here, if you could make anyone in the world do anything you want just by naming it, you’d at the very least be tempted to satisfy various carnal desires, right? Anyone who’s never at least daydreamed about this must have spent puberty in a coma. But to see it play out with a grown man exploiting the fact that people are helpless to resist his superpower is (intentionally) revolting.

Again, the show confronts this head-on, and forces the audience to do the same. And at a pivotal moment in the narrative, when Kilgrave has forced Jessica to spend time with him, not by using his superpower but with old-fashioned extortionate threats (do what I say or I will use my powers to make people you care about do unspeakable things), Jessica unloads on Kilgrave, demanding that he acknowledge what it is that he does, what it means and what the consequences are. She doesn’t use euphemisms. She tells him that he raped her. “You raped me,” she says, more than once. Which he did, of course, and that’s what I was euphemistically referring to above as “the super-villain getting the best of the heroine in profoundly disturbing fashion for a long time”. In the backstory, Kilgrave met Jessica Jones and told her she found him irresistible and wanted to be with him, and she did it. For months or years, she was his companion, arm candy and sex slave, seemingly willingly but in truth totally unwillingly, because that’s how Kilgrave’s powers work. He gets what he wants, despite anything anyone else might think or feel or suffer as a result.

That in and of itself could probably qualify as one of the most important themes to be addressed by a piece of pop culture in 2016. And especially now, as we seem to be at real risk of drowning in the sentiments of a small, crass, disproportionately amplified segment of our society whose credo is “we want what we want and we don’t give a fuck who that hurts or who else stands to lose”, it feels pretty goddamn prescient. But what really struck me in that scene, and what I imagine will haunt me for years and years to come, is the contrast between what Jessica is saying (and Ritter’s powerful, unflinching delivery of it) and Tennant-as-Kilgrave’s reaction.

I tried, I really did, to find a screencap or an animated gif of the exact moment, but no luck. I shall have to fall back on description. In the scene, Kilgrave is slouching in a chair while Jessica stands across the room enumerating his sins. She says “You raped me” and the camera cuts to him. He sneers and rolls his eyes. He shifts his weight in the chair with visible discomfort. And he grumbles, mostly to himself, “Gah, I hate that word.”

There it is, folks, that’s my nominee for 2016-in-a-nutshell, first prize. This past year has frequently felt like one big long fight, specifically a fight where both sides are playing by different rules and aiming for different things. On one side, people who recognize injustice and want to force others to acknowledge it so we can all move on and do something about righting the wrongs. On the other side, people who refuse to engage, who deflect by focusing on (a) terminology, (b) the ways that the argument itself makes them feel bad, which is far more important than whatever the argument is actually about, or (c) both. All of our cultural struggles writ large are present in that aggrieved, dismissive redirection. It’s the prime tactic for today’s bad guys. An athlete kneels during the national anthem to protest police brutality? That’s disrespectful to our armed forces, and I think that guy should just be thankful he lives under the freedoms they fought and died for, and he should show his gratitude by shutting the hell up! A presidential candidate brags about sexually assaulting women and getting away with it because he’s rich and famous? That’s just locker room talk and people are way too oversensitive these days! Man-made climate change is a serious problem we need to take concrete steps to solve immediately? If it still gets cold enough to snow in the winter, then “global warming” is a hoax, and I’m not giving up my 6 mpg truck! I could go on and on, except it took me like an hour to force myself to type out those three examples and if I try for four I think I might kill myself.

(And yes, I am well aware that this sometimes cuts both ways - liberals defending Roe v Wade who think the most important thing is to rebrand the “pro-life” movement as the “anti-choice” movement, or those who get caught up in arguing whether or not safe spaces are good ideas or trigger warnings are valuable while ignoring the root causes, and so forth. But my point stands that litigating semantics and/or obtusely changing the subject are both dick moves no matter which side employs them as tactics. Like a great many wrongheaded impulses, from gerrymandering to genocide, it’s a bad idea no matter whose idea it is.)

Some things - perhaps most things - which are genuine problems with demonstrably harmful effects are difficult to talk about. They make us uncomfortable, as well they should, whether it’s some form of guilt that we caused them or made them worse, through action or inaction, or just the fact that they skeeve us out. Nobody willingly grapples with pain and death. But sometimes the only way forward, the only way to make things better, is to do things unwillingly, not because they’re pleasant but because they’re right. And talking about things, honestly seeing things and calling them what they are, is the bare minimum first step for that. And yet we’ve reached the point where people balk at even that. A word makes them twitch and they somehow channel that into an indignation which gives them every right to refuse to engage, full stop. It’s appalling. And writing a supervillain who is genuinely appalling is a high achievement within the genre! But when that appalling super-villain resonates so very deeply, it’s time for all of us to take a long, hard look in the mirror and figure out if we’re going to make our feelings paramount at the expense of our future.

Don't wanna be right

Poe's law strikes again:

I honestly cannot tell if the above graphic (found in a Google image search which somehow conflated my search terms - what should I be for halloween - with other tangential interrogatives - should I celebrate halloween at all and thereby risk my immortal soul - as algorithms are, I suppose, wont to do) is completely and utterly (and cluelessly) earnest in its admonitions, or a smirking parody of that way of thinking (or the outsider perception thereof).

On the side of sincerity, there's the fact that the text is deeply hokey in a way that seems utterly unironic.

On the side of satire, I mean ... if you want to put people off of something, why would you superimpose your message over an image that is so wicked awesome? Did you see that jack-o-lantern? That thing is rad as hell.

Ah well. Happy Halloween, anyway! And hey, remember a couple years ago when I used to talk about the How the West Was Weird anthologies I contributed stories to? Well, the fine folks at that publishing house, PulpWork Press, have an annual holiday anthology, too. And this year the holiday in question is Halloween. Hie thee to Amazon and you can buy a paperback copy or download a copy on your Kindle - and if you happen to be reading this on the intended posting date, today is the last day you can snag that Kindle edition FOR FREE!

Get us out from under

Today, according to no less an authority than the United Nations (which we all know will go down in history as the seemingly benign yet ultimately malevolent precursor of the One World Government run by the cabal of Lizard People who drink human blood and fill the atmosphere with mind-control gas) is ... WONDER WOMAN DAY!!!

2016 is in fact the 75th anniversary of Wonder Woman's debut, and from here on out I will resist the urge to provide detailed historical context because, honestly, I deem it neither necessary nor advisable. I mean, it's Wonder Woman. Everyone knows her, she has instant name and visual recognition, and yet ... once you get past the stuff everyone knows (Amazon princess, invisible jet, bracelets, lasso) there is an almost immediate drop-off into extremely deep esoterica which is arcane and convoluted and more often than not self-contradictory (and that includes the behind the scenes stuff about her creation and stewardship by various writers and artists every bit as much as her labyrinthine fictional biography). Suffice it to say that however impressive you may find it that a fictional character would achieve popularity with the public and hold onto it for seven and a half decades and counting, it's orders of magnitude more amazing when you consider how many variations, re-inventions and utterly bananas developments Wonder Woman has endured in all that time.

When I was a senior in college my friends and I played a lot of Justice League Task Force, which despite the bureaucratically tinged name was actually just a classic (dumb) button-masher fighting game for the Super Nintendo. I remember Wonder Woman being a particularly fun character to play. Here is a screenshot from that game featuring the Themysciran champion kicking Aquaman in the head. Good times.

Happy anniversary, Wonder Woman. Assuming the Lizard People allow any human literature to survive the Great Epochal Molting, I look forward to enjoying your centennial by re-reading old Justice League comics via my cerebral implants.

Feminine mystique

Clearly I had a few election-oriented demons I needed to get out of my system, but fear not - this is still much more of a pop culture blog (such as it is) than a political one.

Case in point: this past weekend my wife and I finally got around to seeing the 2016 Ghostbusters. We had both expressed interest in seeing it back in the summer, but never got around to it. Then a Saturday night rolled around where our kids couldn't agree on what movie they wanted to watch (weirdly enough the eight year old and five year old wanted to watch Toy Story 2 while the three year old would settle for nothing less than Return of the Jedi) and since we were going to split them up to appease them anyway we sent the big kids up to the master bedroom for their Pixar screening and let the bino have the basement all to himself for Episode VI. My wife and I claimed the den (aka The Best Seats and Best Screen in the House) and figured we'd live on the edge and on demand ourselves a movie. And Ghostbusters it was.

The craziest thing was, after all the controversy through the development and pre-production and online trolls screaming about their childhoods being retroactively ruined and other, different kinds of trolls howling that "women aren't funny" and, to be fair, a good number of people defending the premise of the movie and its inherent right to exist, all that, through the movie coming out and not making spectacular box office and being considered a disappointment that probably wouldn't end up spawning a franchise-load of sequels, my wife and I delivered our verdict on the movie the next day and deemed it to be ... fine.

We liked it, but we didn't love it. We enjoyed it, but only as a satisfactory amusement for a quiet Saturday evening in. All of which would barely merit a blog post were it not for all the aforementioned hubbub that originally surrounded the movie.

I felt like the movie was a bit underwritten. Maybe there's a director's cut out there somewhere that gives the whole Abby and Erin arc a bit more drive, but it just didn't grab me. On the other hand, Patty and Holtzmann didn't have arcs at all, shapeless or otherwise, and that's okay because mostly they were dual comic relief, but I kept waiting in particular for a really gut-busting moment from Kate McKinnon and realized that I had already seen all her good bits in various trailers, reviews, and other bits of the collective pop consciousness. I heard that the ghost effects were spectacular in 3D in the theater, but since I saw it at home, I really can't speak to that.

Ultimately my wife hit the nail on the head when she said she had to admit - even though on some level it pained her - that the best-slash-funniest element of the movie was ... Chris Hemsworth.

Which I agreed to without reservation. He really was a hoot, and again it kind of reinforces how mediocre, good-not-great the movie was when "a hoot" can so easily clear the bar of being the best/funniest part.

I've copped in the past to utterly embracing the SJW label, and my wife is in the same boat with me. But I think this is a pretty fair example of the difference between actual, human SJW's and the haters' strawman arguments against them. My wife and I both want to see a fair and just world with gender equality (and racial equality and all the other components of enlightened coexist blah blah blah), which means we support the idea of anything that moves in that direction, gender-swapped reboots of beloved childhood properties included. We want to fall in love with these new pieces of art and we want them to succeed by winning over large numbers of people. But, since those pieces of art are made by human beings as flawed as the rest of us, sometimes they don't turn out as amazing as we might have hoped. And when that happens, we can admit it! We are fully capable of facing reality. I'm glad I only paid $5.99 to on-demand Ghostbusters from my couch rather than buying $34 worth of movie theater tickets. I won't insist that everyone else run out and see it, or sign petitions demanding a G2 in 2018 (despite the fact that I kind of liked where they were going in the epilogue; ultimately I just didn't think they earned it). On the other hand, when I do go bonkers for something and urge other people to embrace it as I have (ahem, ahem, Fury Road) I am 100% sincere and stand behind my proclamations fully. When the haters hurl accusations at people who are rooting for diversity in entertainment of being the thought police and insisting that everyone has to like everything across the board that ticks off the boxes of identity politics and representation and nobody's allowed to say a negative word, I just have to call bullshit on that. I don't do that, and I don't see anyone else doing that, and fighting against the fear of someone hypothetically doing that seems counterproductive at best.

So yeah, for me, the new Ghostbusters was a swing and a miss. But I am glad they took the swing.

P.S. The bino (who is three and a half now) wandered into the den during the middle of the movie. We didn't really make a big deal out of it, figuring that if he thought the ghosts were too scary or too intense he could always show himself out and return to one of the various other kiddie movies playing throughout the house. But he really liked it. He especially enjoyed the demonic apparition at the rock concert, though he insisted on repeatedly calling it a "dragon". Which, admittedly, is kind of hard to argue with.

Might be

If you've ever been sued by the federal government for housing discrimination ... you might be a racist.

If you've ever been quoted as saying "I think that the guy is lazy. And it’s probably not his fault, because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is, I believe that. It’s not anything they can control." ... you might be a racist.

If you've ever taken out a full page ad to advocate for the death penalty for black teenagers accused of rape ... you might be a racist.

If you stuck to your guns on that whole thing 27 years later even after those men had been exonerated by DNA evidence and had their convictions vacated ... you might be a racist.

If you've ever insisted that an American judge of Mexican descent can't be impartial in hearing your case because you're "building a wall" ... you might be a racist.

If the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives has ever characterized your remarks about that judge as "the textbook definition of a racist comment" ... you might be a racist.

If you think all minorities live in squalid conditions in the inner city ... you might be a racist.

If you think Black Lives Matter is a hate group ... you might be a racist.

If you've ever told rally crowds that "other communities" are trying to steal the election, and urged people to go to the polls and watch for trouble ("you all know what I'm talking about") ... you might be a racist.

If you've ever tweeted out a graphic that claims, under the heading USA Crime Statistics 2015, egregiously false stats like "Whites killed by blacks - 81% Blacks killed by blacks - 97%" ... you might be a racist.

If you won't disavow the support of David Duke, who is a white nationalist, antisemitic conspiracy theorist, Holocaust denier, and former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan ... you might be a racist.

And if you would elect, as President of the United States of America, someone who has done all of the above ... you might be a racist, too. Or, maybe, just maybe, you're not racist ... it's just that you're white and you're not really affected by racism and don't think it's that big a deal and you're willing to give a guy a pass on all that stuff because you're more concerned with other things. But that's hardly any better.

Ill Logic

So hey, did you all know that this is a presidential election year in the U.S. of A.? It's true! Much has been made of the fact that the two R/D choices available to voters in November are both sub-optimal. Some people see this as one candidate being flawed but acceptable, and the other being irredeemable. And some people see it ... in exactly the same terms, but with the descriptors flipped for the respective candidates. All of which is pretty much par for the course for partisan American politics in the 21st century.

(For the record, I'm With Her, for three reasons: her platform is one I very much agree with; her opponent's platform is one I very much disagree with; her opponent is a giant lump of orange dickcheese masquerading as a human in physical form but failing every conceivable test of having a human soul.)

And then there are some other people who insist on trying to slip between the horns of the dilemma, and full-throatedly back a Third Party Option. It seems like 2016 in particular has brought out a lot more of these folks than usual, or maybe has brought out the usual ranks more loudly than usual. Maybe it's just that this is the first prez-cycle during which I've been connected to Facebook. Maybe it's just been long enough since Nader in 2000 that the pendulum was due to swing again, or maybe it's not so much the pure passage of time as an unavoidable side-effect of eight years of relatively successful Democratic control of the White House and the potential for four more.

And I don't discount the undeniable influence of the major party candidates themselves. They sure are unpopular! If either one were running against almost anyone else, we'd be gearing up for a historic landslide, and if neither were running, it would likely be the same old, same old ho-hum party line voting. But with both in the mix, a large number of people are generally put off and discouraged, which does present a particularly opportune-looking moment for a third party to seize.

Don't get me wrong, I said "opportune-looking" for a reason. Looks can be deceiving. A third party is not going to win the Presidency; a third party most likely won't win a single electoral vote. Nevertheless, the neither/nors are whooping it up this year, convinced they have a real shot if only the sheeple would wake up and do the right thing!

In particular, I am of course talking about the Libertarians, and I have noticed a distressing trend amongst them (by which I mean, in the Facebook feeds of people I know who are All In For Johnson): they seem to spend less time touting the virtues of their candidate than in loudly declaiming that both R/D candidates are equally bad (which is absolutely absurd on the face of it by any rational metric) or going even further and asserting that SHE is even WORSE than HE is (which, see previous aside, times a million).

And how do they back up these specious claims impugning the Democratic candidate? Basically by regurgitating every piece of Republican mud-slinging, rumor-mongering, paranoia-stoking agitprop of the past 25 years.

How to account for this? The way I see it, there are two possibilities:

ONE: For all their smug boasting and bragging about how they are all fiercely independent free-thinkers and not mindless drones like the sorry two-party-system supporters, Libertarians are actually pretty stupid. They see multiple congressional inquiries yielding up absolutely nothing not as exoneration, but as proof that "something fishy is going on with that woman". The decades-long existence of the witchhunt proves that the witchhunt absolutely needs to exist. It seems strange that someone who was not already devoutly, rabidly Republican would latch onto this as an irrefutable truth, but I can't say it beggars belief. Libertarianism is political philosophy for babies. It requires a solipsistic worldview and a fundamentally backwards belief that, after two world wars and decades of cold war and the (not so much) recent global war on terror, the U.S. can just go back to international isolationism with no consequences whatsoever. It is the belief that life will be best for everyone if everyone can do whatever they want and no one is ever forced to help anyone else in need and all disputes are settled by the invisible hand of the free market. It's kind of cute when an eighteen year old discovers and embraces Libertarianism, but one would hope that a certain combination of empathy and pragmatism would eventually win out. For someone to be thirty- or forty-something and Libertarian just strikes me as pathetic arrested development. So yeah, maybe that contingent is incapable of critical reasoning, and ripe for the brainwashing by Republican oppo "research".

TWO: Libertarians are actually super-geniuses! They are deeply cynical master manipulators playing three-dimensional chess and thinking seventeen moves ahead. They realized all along that it's mathematically impossible for a third party to get even a plurality of votes when 35 - 40% of people are hardcore Dems and 35 - 40% of people are hardcore GOP and only 20 - 30% of the votes, tops, are actively in play. They further realized that the only way to increase the free share was to knock down the Big Two; it really is a zero-sum game in that sense. And on top of all that, they realized that HIS campaign was always smoke and mirrors and would eventually implode, so they strategically focused on knocking HER down as many pegs as possible. They see right through the bullshit that the Republicans have been peddling since the 90's but they also recognize that it has a certain hypnotic power through repetition, so they took hold of it to wield at will in their effort to level the playing field. So in the end, Libertarians are just another flavor of politicians, playing the same games, devoid of principles, defining truth as "whatever benefits me most in this election", and desperately hoping no one notices. That's not even a put down, really, it just is what it is, human nature when people jockey for power.

As I said, this all occurs to me because of specific things I've seen posted on social media by specific people, people I consider friends. And I honestly don't know which explanation would make me sadder.

Darth Tahwtiaw

THIS MEME MAKES NO SENSE. I mean, it's funny because butts are funny. But the underlying premise is absurd.

There seems to be a pretty well-established formula for coming up with Sith Lord names. The canonical ones are:

Darth Bane
Darth Plagueis
Darth Sidious
Darth Maul
Darth Tyranus
Darth Vader

(And if you're deep on the old, pre-TFA Extended Universe you might throw in Darth Revan, Darth Caedus and Darth Traya, too.)

These aren't backwards names! I've never met somebody named Luam or Suoidis, have you? More to the point, they're not even random combinations of letters the way you could argue some minor Star Wars characters (or other fantasy/sci-fi creations all across the genres) appear - Nien Nunb or Mon Mothma and whatnot.

They are English words or word-fragments and they are about as subtle as chainsaws in signalling that their bearers are Evil Bad Guys. "Bane" means the undoing of something. "Maul" means to seriously wound. (See also "General Grievous", not technically a Sith but definitely squarely in the "Title and Straight Up Word For Something Harmful" camp.) "Plagueis" is just the word "plague" with some extra letters at the end to make it sound slightly less on the nose and more like a name, and the same goes for "Tyranus"/"tyrant". "Vader" sounds like "invader" with the first syllable dropped, just like "Sidious" is a foreshortened "insidious".

(It's hard to tell with the other three if they were subverting or ignoring the rule or what, although to be fair I think a lot of the EU Darths were introduced even before the prequels, which really hammered the rule home. Still: "Revan" could be a clipped form of "revanche" or "revenant" or even good old "revenge"; "Caedus" is about one letter off from being an anagram of "seduce" and seeing as how he's the conceptual predecessor of Kylo Ren's origin story, that tracks; and "Traya" is close enough to "traitor" that I rest my case.)

So yeah, you want to come up with your Mos Eisley Cantina Regular Name (Momaw Nadon) or your Maz's Tavern Hanger-On Name (Wollivan) go ahead and mash up or rearrange your middle name and the city where you were born. But if you're planning on introducing yourself as you fire up a red lightsaber, you'd better be leaning towards something like Darth Corruptus or Darth Quisition or something. Otherwise people are never going to take you seriously.

I've officially run out of clever ways to allude to life being circular

I started a new gig this week. The job interview I made vague reference to last month led to a job offer which led to me terminating my nine-year government contracting stint and taking a week off and embarking on a brand new adventure. Different industry, different title/position, different commute - all things I may very well (hopefully) return to in subsequent posts. Because the blog isn't dead yet, dangit!

First week and all, I went out to lunch a fair number of times. Monday my new boss (who's actually an old friend) and one of my fellow team members took me to a perfectly mid-scale sandwich place. Tuesday I just grabbed something from the snack shop and ate at my desk. Wednesday my boss and I went out for Asian. Yesterday I brought leftovers from home.

Today my boss and I went to a kabob place.

I got the falafel. Because of course I did.

So far, off to a good start.

Out-of-this-world Social Media Tuesday

The Green Moon! So many questions!

1 - Wow, what are the odds that an astronomical event which lasts 90 minutes and happens only once every 420 years would fall directly on 4/20? I'm no mathemetician, but it has to be somewhere around the magnitude of "you gotta be fucking kidding me."

2 - I'm a little bit disappointed that it doesn't last for 80 (4x20) minutes. Come on, solar system, get your shit together.

3 - OK, obviously this is a semi-sophisticated bit of trolling, but is it being perpetrated by stoners? That would explain the green/420 references but man, isn't the whole point of being a stoner that you purposefully have other habits to occupy your time besides intesive-focus activities like photoshopping elaborate satirical memes? So, is it a non-stoner simultaneously trolling stoners and scientifically illiterate people who uncritically like and share dumb pseudo-science memes? Or a non-stoner who kind of weirdly wishes they could be a stoner, knows the shibboleths and thinks incorporating them is extra-hilarious?

4 - And perhaps the most important question of all: I saw this meme on Facebook because friends of mine were liking and sharing it. Are those friends in on the joke, and sharing it ironically? They must be, right? Right?

Stretching all the way back

Young Frankenstein was a movie I watched a lot when I was a kid, at first because it was one of my dad’s favorite comedies and eventually because I grew to love it as much as he did. It’s not exactly a pop culture obscurity, and among people who tend to work movie quotes into conversation, lots of them reference Frau Blücher and “walk this way” and “taffeta, darling” and “put the candle back!” But where I think my family might have stood out was how frequently we called back to “Could be worse. Could be raining!”

I was thinking of this today, or actually a variation on it: could have been raining yesterday. Because it is in fact raining today in the nation’s capital, in addition to being unseasonably cold, and my fleeting forays out from under cover to get on and off the train were less than pleasant. But it would have been worse if this weather had showed up a day earlier.

Because yesterday, I showed up to work without my badge, which meant I couldn’t get into the building. I knew exactly where my badge was: sitting in my computer card-reader (I now guiltily confess that it’s been so long since I updated the blog with any regularity that I don’t remember if I ever properly chronicled the transition from wearing badges and having a separate network access card to using the network access card as a badge/ID and electronic door-unlocking mechanism all in one. On the one hand, there are fewer dingles and dongles to keep track of, but on the other, if you mislay your card you are multitudinously hosed.) So my vague plan was to stand outside the front door of the building and hope to encounter a sympathetic co-worker upon their arrival, and then beg a favor of them. And in a turn of rare good fortune, this plan actually worked fairly well. One of my colleagues, who is a fellow contractor but an employee of a different firm and thus both sympathetic and not at all responsible for me, arrived about five or ten minutes after I took up my post, and she was willing to go upstairs, fetch my badge from my desk, and bring it down to me so I could get in and get on with my day. So my forgetfulness only caused a minor glitch, standing around nervously for a bit on a cold but sunny morning.

Now normally I am pretty good about keeping track of my stuff, creature of habit that I am, so you may be wondering why I was badgeless Wednesday morning in the first place. Indeed, there was a very specific reason, namely that I had left work on Tuesday in a rush because of a minor calamity at home. Mondays and Tuesdays are my wife’s days off and when I had left the house on Tuesday morning the state of the household was somewhat mixed. The little girl was sick, and was likely going to spend most of the day on the couch, with my wife tending to her needs while also keeping tabs on the bino (who just turned three and is as big a handful as ever), while I was at work and the little guy was at school. The little girl had been sick since the night before (or was it two nights before? I admit at this point it’s all starting to blur together.) and my wife had been performing most of the direct-contact caretaking duties. This ultimately took its toll and by mid-morning on Tuesday my wife had fully succumbed to the horrible bug and was no longer up to the task of minding an ill five-year-old and a rambunctious three-year-old. So she called me and I gathered my things and bolted, trying to mentally assemble an improvised way home out of Metro schedules and taxi rides. But in my haste I forgot my badge.

The day before that had been oddly off-model as well. It was a non-holiday Monday and yet every single person was home. Business as usual for my wife and the younger two kids, whereas I had taken the day off because of a scheduled job interview (shhhhh) in the afternoon and the little guy was home sick with the last vestiges of his own bout of the bug. He was mostly recovered, so it was a fairly low-key morning (pretty sure the kids all stayed in pajamas until almost noon) and I made it to my interview on time, but it ran late, and then I had to drive home from said interview during rush hour (and in the rain!).

Sunday was the day when the little guy was mainly in convalescent mode, although he had first fallen ill Saturday night. My wife and I had had a date night scheduled for Saturday evening for weeks, with a babysitter lined up in the form of a favor-returned by someone my wife had done cat-sitting for. We got the kids ready for the weekly movie night, the sitter arrived, and my wife and I set out. The plan was to hit a local drinkery for a bit and then proceed to a local eatery (or not so local; there is no Outback Steakhouse in our town and it’s been years since I’ve been to one, and it may be mid-range low-brow bo-bo but I am quite fond of that joint, as is my wife, so that was where we were planning to jaunt some distance to and treat ourselves on our wild night of freedom) but right about the time we were contemplating closing the tab at the brewpub, we got a call from the sitter than the little guy was tossing his little cookies. So that cut things a bit short and set off the plague invasion.

And ironically all of this crazy shared sickness and schedule rearranging (after I came home early on Tuesday, my wife took a sick day yesterday, which was just as well because the bino got sent home from daycare before lunchtime with a fever, which magically disappeared by the mid-afternoon visit to the pediatrician’s office, then returned by dinnertime; today my wife is back on the job though still not feeling 100%, the two younger kids are home with a sitter, and the little guy and I are more or less on regular routine) came on the heels of the previous week, where my wife worked several late nights and we continuously commented on what a crazy week it was, and then on Friday …

… on Friday I left the office at the usual time and walked to the train station, where there was a large crowd of people. Not terribly unusual for a Friday; I always take the earliest train home and on Friday more people tend to do the same. And in this case some of the crowd was owing to the fact that trains were running late, and people who would normally have boarded and departed (on the earliest train on the other line the station serves) were still hanging around waiting. The announcement system was indicating trains were running 15 minutes late. Not the end of the world. Then that expanded to 20, 30, 45 minutes. I was texting my wife to keep her posted. She was home at the time, but had a 6:00 appointment to keep (again, apologies, I don’t think I’ve devoted any blog-space to the fact that my wife started a new job where she exclusively makes housecalls, or if I did it was fleeting and long ago, so there you go: Wednesday through Friday and sometimes on weekends when she is on the clock she is variously at home waiting for a call, driving around a very large service area, or at someone’s house tending to an extremely sick animal). Around the time that my train had not shown up after 75 minutes of waiting, with the system announcements continuing to indicate delays “up to an hour” we finalized our own plan, which went a little something like this:

- I got on Metro and took it to the end of the line
- She picked up the kids from daycare and drove them straight to the Metro
- I jumped in the car and all five of us proceeded to her 6:00 appointment
- She got out at the appt. with her gear, and I hopped behind the wheel and took the kids out to dinner at McDonald’s
- (Incidentally it was one of the saddest McD’s I’ve ever been to. It was in a strip mall, not a free-standing structure in the parking lot of a strip mall but one of the small storefronts. Not only did they not have the Playplace I had been hoping for to placate the kids, but they did not have napkins or ketchup. At least they had Happy Meals.)
- When my wife was done with her appointment, I drove the kids back to pick her up.
- All five reunited again, we made the hourlong drive back home just in time to tell the kids they could skip bath but had to brush their teeth and go straight to bed.

I say again, it was ironic that we thought that Friday night was as disjointed as things were going to get, back before the rolling waves of decrepitude swamped us. On the bright side, at least both my job and my wife’s have been cool about our need for flexibility, and at least nobody has been so seriously ill as to need to go to the hospital or anything, and at least I’ve dodged the bullet and everyone else seems on the upswing one way or another. Could be worse, even though it is raining.

Bad at Math

It's Social Media Tuesday so I am going to rant about something I saw making the rounds on Facebook a few weeks ago: Death Wish Coffee.

I failed to grab a screencap of the actual meme that was passed from page to page, but to the best of my recollection it claimed that Death Wish was the strongest coffee in the world, with 200% more caffeine than a standard cup of coffee. It also observed that drinking it was not recommended for those with heart conditions or anyone who wants to sleep in the next three days.

Har har har.

I just found the whole thing baffling, mainly because it seems to regard caffeine as this quasi-magical substance that must be handled with delicate circumspection. I drink a ton of caffeine on the regular (and I'm well aware that this probably has a deleterious effect on my health, but that particular horse has long since left the barn). I drink my coffee every morning, seven days a week, from a comically large mug, which just might be twice the size of a standard coffee cup. I also drink soda like Coke and Mountain Dew which have plenty of caffeine themselves. I used to drink Jolt, when that was a thing. I've been mainlining caffeine since I was 16, so that's nearly three decades of constant consumption which has turned the drug into something I'm largely metabolically immune to, and at this point is somewhere between a habit I haven't kicked and a psychological placebo. Sometimes on a Saturday I might have two comically large mugs of coffee in the morning, a soda at lunch, and go to a movie at night and enjoy a medium 44 oz. soda then as well. And I never do anything once I finally get in bed other than fall asleep like a baby.

So if I were to drink a cup of Death Wish Coffee, I doubt very much it would keep me awake for days on end. It would probably just make me have to pee, maybe a little faster than the usual brew.

And the thing is, all of the above notwithstanding, I don't consider myself a coffee junkie, at least not out of any proportion compared to the average American. One thing I don't do is go to Starbucks mid-morning and/or mid-afternoon, although I do see loads of people around me doing just that on a daily basis. And certainly the soda manufacturers of our fine country are not going out of business. There are loads of people drinking several caffeinated beverages over the course of any given day, is what I'm saying.

So who, exactly, would lose sleep if they so much as allowed Death Wish coffee to touch their lips? The only reasonable conclusion I can draw is that someone at some point mistakenly thought that "200% more caffeine" meant "200 times as much caffeine". Because, yes, I'll grant you that my twenty-six-and-counting years of building up a tolerance to caffeine would probably be blown away by getting two hundred doses all at once in a single cup of coffee. I daresay that much stimulant in such concentration would either leave me vibrating like a cartoon character or in fact literally kill me. But that's not what 200% more means. It means two extra, an equivalent total of three in the space of one. So drinking one cup of Death Wish coffee is like drinking three cups of regular coffee, which is something normal people do over the course of a day without batting an eye (or unbatting them when it comes time to turn in for the night). It doesn't sound like reckless self-endangerment to me so much as a bit of a timesaver.

Apparently nobody who propagates the meme has thought this through, though. They read "200% more" and think "200 cups of coffee ZOMG SO MUCH". Or maybe it's just a question of scale. If my entire yearly income were to increase by 200%, that would be life-changing. Ditto if the number of small children I had living under my roof went from three to nine. But caffeinated coffee is such a small thing in the grand scheme of life that a factor of two bump doesn't strike me as earth-shattering. All I can do is just shake my head at the arithmetic illiteracy, if in fact that's what it really is. Of course a lot of these people gobsmacked at the outrageous caffeine content of Death Wish are the same ones who complain that they can't help their kids with their Common Core math homework because it's so counter-intuitive. That's probably a screed for another day, though.

To be The Man you've got to beat The Man

Did the whole Super Bowl party thing last night, which was a relatively sedate affair. Five couples gathered around the ceremonial wings and beer to watch the game, and there was very little rooting interest in the actual participants. One couple was pulling hard for Denver, and the rest of us (a motley assortment of fans of New York, Philly, Pittsburgh, Washington, New England and ... Arsenal, I think?) were fairly agnostic. Not only were none of our teams playing for the championship, but none of our teams' hated rivals were playing either. (I've spent as many if not more Super Bowls rooting against the Pats, Ravens and Cowboys as I have for the Steelers or Giants, I'm pretty sure.) We were the platonic ideal fans, tuning in because of the spectacle and just hoping for a good game.

Then the Broncos fan left around halftime and we all started openly rooting for the Panthers.

OK, not really, mainly at that point we just wanted to see the game get interesting and maybe Carolina mount an impressive comeback, though obviously that didn't happen. I said during the pre-game, and I said truthfully, that I would not be disappointed with either of the two potential outcomes. I like Peyton Manning and I like the idea of him winning two Super Bowls for two different teams and going out a champ, since everyone (myself included) assumes his retirement announcement will come some time Wednesday morning, if only because the victory parade in Denver isn't until Tuesday afternoon. But I also like Cam Newton and thought the Panthers had a great season and liked the idea of them claiming the trophy just fine as well.

If anything, I was leaning towards rooting for the Panthers because I like my pro sports to be entertaining (if they're not vindicating my personal fandom investment - I'm totally fine with a Giants or Yankees coronation that bores everyone else to tears). Peyton at the end of his career is basically grinding it out, and there's nothing wrong with that per se but I admit I tend to undervalue things like the inherent nobility of stolid work ethic and overvalue razzle-dazzle, especially in the specific, superficial sphere of American athletic events. And of course, I don't always get what I want. Super Bowl 50 was a microcosm of late-stage Peyton Manning, the game manager trusting in his running backs and his defense to methodically do their jobs and not give the game away.

And again, it wasn't a thrilling instant classic but the end result is Peyton's second ring and secure legacy and that's cool. The game was broadcast for free on network tv so I can't say I didn't get my money's worth.

Weirdly enough, even having just articulated that Peyton is an athlete whom I respect without ever really getting stoked about, I'll miss not having him around the NFL in the future. But I suppose time will tell how much longer we'll have him pitching insurance and pizzas and whatnot in our living rooms.

Destroying the Destroyer

This past weekend, during the Great Snow-In of 2016, my wife and I watched the Thor movie from 2011. I had offhandedly mentioned the possibility of renting/streaming Thor: The Dark World, which as I recently mentioned I haven't seen yet, and my wife expressed interest in watching that with me but also wanted to see the original, since she had missed that the first time around. I certainly enjoyed the first Thor enough to be up for a re-watch, and so we settled in for some Asgardian antics on Saturday night, and will get around to the sequel some other weekend (and/or homebound winter weather event).

So she liked the movie and I liked it all over again but I was particularly struck by the first half of the climax. Spoilers for some/recap for others: on Earth, Thor-in-exile confronts the mystic Asgardian artifact the Destroyer, willingly laying down his life to end its rampage, which restores his worthiness and godly birthright. Returned to full strength, Thor defeats the Destroyer (end of first half of climax) then returns to Asgard, confronts and defeats Loki, and blows up the Bifrost in order to save the Frost Giants from Loki's attempted genocide. It's a lot of sturm and drang, appropriately enough! But as I said, my focus here is on the Midgard stuff.

They shot Thor in New Mexico, in one of those synchronicities of plotting and budgeting (I assume): the friends Thor makes on Earth are astrophysicists studying phenomenon in the night sky, so of course they're hanging out in the middle-of-nowhere desert away from light pollution. The showdown between Thor and Sif and the Warriors Three and the Destroyer takes place in a tiny town that looks like it has about five streets, one diner (with big plate windows for bodies to go flying through) and one gas station (to blow up real good from the Destroyer's heat blasts).

I mean of course there's some nasty collateral damage, because it's an action-adventure movie and those sort of visuals (a) raise the narrative stakes with a sense of danger and (b) look totally rad. But what's noteworthy is that when the Destroyer first stomps into town, the other Asgardians go to fight it while Thor helps his new human friends to evacuate the town. Thor does humble, subservient (and, not for nothing, a bit Christlike) things like picking up little kids and putting them in the back of a pickup truck so they can get the heck out of the combat zone. When all the civilians are gone, that's when Thor goes to face the Destroyer and offer his own surrender.

Then he gets his powers back and it's ON. And one thing I really like is that they don't forget to emphasize Thor's powers over storms as god of thunder. He doesn't just punch the Destroyer or smack it with Mjolnir, he actually summons up a tornado by spinning the hammer, and the vortex sucks up the Destroyer so that they are both in midair, with the Destroyer hurling fiery blasts out of its face and Thor swatting them aside until finally he batters the blasts back into the Destroyer's head, overwhelming it and blowing it up.

In many fair points of comparison, Thor is essentially Marvel's Superman. (I'm far from the first person to observe this, obvs.) They both have red capes and fly. They're both big guns, superstrong and tough. Neither one is human. The weather control stuff is one of the big differentiations, which is one reason I approved of their inclusion in the Destroyer scene. But notice, if you would, the other narrative function the tornado serves: at that point they're so high above the rooftops that the impressive explosion doesn't do any further property damage to the little desert town. This is the right way to dispatch an enemy, and Thor takes care to do it this way because he is a good guy.

Clearly I am teeing up to yet again take a whack at how Man of Steel fundamentally fails its title character. In my defense, the hype machine for Batman V. Superman has been roaring along lately, and I've been sitting through the trailer while trying to socially enjoy other things (The Force Awakens, the NFL playoffs) which naturally gives rise to people talking about anticipation for the Man of Steel sequel ... and what am I supposed to do, just sit there and smile and nod and not remind people what a garbage fire of cynical dreck Man of Steel was? So the portrayal of the ultimate altruistic omnibenevolent superhero as someone who wouldn't know the right thing to do if it smacked him in the spitcurl, who doesn't spare a thought to innocent bystanders or cataclysmic property damage while he whizzes around trading blows with his antithesis, has been top of mind.

I just never made this explicit connection between the first Thor movie and the new Superman movie before. Thor came out two years before Man of Steel, after all, and plenty of other stuff got processed through my overthink-a-tron in the interval. And I gotta say, even at the time when I first saw Thor, it didn't really leap out at me how Thor was motivated by a desire to preemptively clear the battlefield and move things to an atmospheric level where the fallout on human lives would be minimized. I just took it in stride as The Way These Things Are Done In The Superhero Stories I Was Raised On. It took Man of Steel's obliteration of the rules of engagement to make me consciously aware of it, and now, in retrospect, Thor comes out ... well, if not looking even better, at least proving the point that it's not that hard to get the fundamentals right.

So yeah. Goyer and Snyder can keep on being the worst imaginable custodians of superheroic legacy. There's plenty of other filmmakers out there who actually get it and whose movies I'll happily support.

After you, no no, after you

The other day as I was leaving the Big Gray I encountered just about the perfect storm of social awkwardness. Normally I pride myself on being reasonably familiar with all the little unspoken rules of politely navigating the working world, how to ride on an elevator or occupy a cubicle with a modicum of respect for the comfort and sanity of fellow human beings. But sometimes circumstances conspire.

Specifically, I was a couple of steps away from pushing through the glass front doors of the office building. The doors open outward from the inside. Another person was outside the building, walking toward the doors to come in. Normally, that would lead to me opening the door and holding it open for the other person, at least, because it’s just polite courtesy, but I gauged that I was going to get to the doors about a step before the other person, which would not really leave me enough time to get through and to the far side of the door before the other person arrived. At best I’d be making them wait a beat or two, and at worst I’d be opening the door right into them. Again, this might not be a problem if the doors opened inward, in which case I could grab the handle and pull the door open and step back, allowing the other person to go through, but they don’t.

I tend to hold doors for everybody, just basically transcending any and all notions of chivalry or feminism or whatever in favor of undifferentiated human decency. (Does this make me an SJW? Discuss.) Still, there are always mitigating factors. For example, if someone is following me or converging on the door from the other side with a few seconds lag, I might be more inclined to hold the door a little longer for, say, a woman of my mother’s or grandmothers’ generation( based on what I assume their expectations might be), or for anyone wrangling one or more small children (been there, buddy). A random dude several paces behind me will probably see me cruise through the door and let it fall shut behind me. So it goes. At any rate, the person I was on a threshold-collision course with was a woman, probably within five years of my age. Should that have changed the etiquette calculus? Also she was wearing a walking cast on one foot, although it didn’t seem to be slowing her roll at all. Should that have changed the calculus? Also she was wearing BDUs! Should that have made me more likely to hold the door, because Support The Troops And All That? Or less likely, because she could kill me with her bare hands eleven different ways and she could dang well open a door for herself, too?

As it happened, in the split-second after I rattled through all of those branches of the decision tree, I decided to try to hustle through the door so that I could in fact position myself to hold the door. But as it also happened, the soldier didn’t alter her pace at all, nor break her gait, and we ended up both going through the door more or less at the same time, me against the door as I pushed it open and her squeezing past on the opposite side.

Not sure if I could have handled the situation any differently to achieve a better outcome. And I know in the grand scheme of things this was a fleeting moment of absolutely no consequence. But it did give me a chance to use yet another screencap of a classic Simpsons moment to illustrate to story, so I figured it was worth sharing.