Hotspur's Naked Singularity

Take Another Little Piece of My Heart

2006-05-23T17:26:00.000-07:00

Long time no blog, I know. And I have lots of legitimate excuses - a wife, an eight-month old baby, a job that's been sixteen hours a day for the last several months. All of which are good reasons.

But none of which, perhaps, are the main reason.

Those of you who are still occasionally lurking around the fringes of this blog in hopes that I might someday get off my ass and start posting more often might recall that there was a time when I tended less toward irate political commentary and more toward what Derek St. Hubbins referred to in "This Is Spinal Tap" as "Spinal Tap Mark II: Jazz Odyssey": free-form fiction and musing from whatever exotic psychological locale my mind was in at the moment. Some of those posts were so personal that I actually took them down; this is not a totally anonymous blog, and at times I felt too exposed, too open. Which is a weird way for me to feel; historically I have a compulsion to vomit myself forward for perusal like Caligula after a big pasta dinner. I actually feel most free when I'm hanging it all out there for everyone to see, warts and all. Like I said, weird.

But lately I feel... I don't know. Tied up. (And not in a good way.) I could comment seventeen times a day about what is now clearly the worst presidential administration in American history, a collection of religious extremists and thugs who loathe the laws they swore to uphold and the system they pledged to defend. But why? To what end? It changes nothing. I'm all for "being the change I wish to see in the world," but I can't stop those criminals, not one bit. They laugh at people like me. You know, Americans.

And I work so hard... and I love what I do, but I'm just tired. Bone tired, physically, emotionally, spiritually. Maybe it's just new parenthood - and don't get me wrong, I adore my daughter - or maybe it's the job, or maybe it's the state of the world, which I feel utterly powerless to remedy. I know, elections in November, etc., but I'll believe the Democratic Party has really grabbed a piece of the zeitgeist when I see it, thanks. I just don't know that I see the point in caring until then, in getting my hopes up for a renaissance in lucidity on the part of an American electorate that has, to this point, shown very little inclination to pay any attention at all to the systematic dismantling of its soul. I know how that sounds. I've bucked up people like me on countless occasions over the past several years. And now I've slid inexorably into the whirlpool with them, slowly at first, but with a coldly certain acceleration.

Have you ever felt so muddled and full of thoughts and feelings and hopes and fears and loves and hates that you CAN'T create anymore? That art feels inadequate to the task of making sense of it all, or even a decent catharsis? That's how I feel. That's how I've felt for months - years, even. I can't be beautiful or graceful or elegant or raw or passionate or ANYTHING about it all. I feel numbed by the enormity of it, watching the water swirl around me as I sink, making no effort to swim or even call for help. Just going slowly down.

Nothing pretty today. Sorry. Just ugly truth.

Free At Last

2006-03-30T13:41:00.000-08:00

I have a very specific nausea reflex when it comes to acts of violence. Like most Americans my age, I'm not generally affected by depictions of violence in film, TV or videogames (although the more graphic the depiction, the less sanguine I remain; the data about such depictions desensitizing test subjects to acts of real-life violence are increasingly conclusive). I'm swiftly moved to the point of physical illness, however, by depictions of violence done to innocents, whether real-life or fictional. I can't bear to stay in the room, for example, while my wife cheerfully digests the true-crime docudrama cable shows produced by Bill Kurtis and his ilk; I know many women, particularly, derive from such programs a sense of vicarious triumph over the understandable anxieties that dog them any time they hear footsteps in a parking garage, and they're welcome to it, but I can hardly stomach the recounting of the cold-blooded slaughter of innocent people, much less the re-enacting of it. (Hell, I got sick once when I accidentally caught the cold opening of a "Law & Order" episode in which two college students using an out-of-town parent's apartment for a little nookie were walked in on by thieves and then methodically blown away, despite tearful pleas for mercy. It may not surprise you to learn I'm not a fan of the show.) This reaction doesn't disturb me; on the contrary, I find my visceral response to such things a welcome confirmation of my own persistent humanity.

All of that is to say that few things sicken me more than when terrorists kidnap innocent people, particularly aid workers or journalists who are there to help non-combatants and get their stories out to the world unfiltered by the military, paramilitary or government powers-that-be. If there's a clearer-cut category of self-defeating evildoing than threatening to take the life of a person not only with whom one has no quarrel, but who is actively trying to do something that aids one's own supposed cause, I can't imagine what it is. I am, for a number of reasons, in foursquare opposition to our misadventures in Iraq, but when I hear of a hostage being beheaded on camera with a knife, for God's sake - no matter who they are: military, contractor, U.N. worker, whatever - my reasoned opposition is sorely, sorely tested. Such acts are not, sad to say, inhuman in the strict sense, but they are acute reminders that the purveyors of "intelligent design" and such nonsense are demonstrably full of crap. We are descended from animals; of that, there is no doubt.

And so today I'm literally overcome with flushed, tangible relief. I rejoice, as I'm sure every person with a beating heart does, to hear that Jill Carroll is a free woman. She says that her captors, though they publicly threatened to take her life on several occasions, treated her well and subjected her to no acts of physical violence at all (although the emotional trauma of her ordeal can only be massive). If that is indeed the case, I am profoundly grateful.

I am not a religious man, but at times like this I often wish I were, if only so I might thank the providence which allowed this mercy to come to pass. I have been sick for three months over Jill Carroll's predicament. Today I am, as my homegirls Emily and Amy would say, a little bit closer to fine.

Welcome home, Ms. Carroll.

jill carroll
Politics
Iraq

Take That, Howie!

2006-03-26T23:03:00.000-08:00

You know, Howard Kurtz used to seem like a reasonable guy, but this Domenech debacle over at Washingtonpost.com has got his moral compass all discombobulated. So imagine my joy to see, via Crooks and Liars, his recent forays into Dittoheadedness utterly refuted - by a plucky young journalist whose passion and righteous indignation had me leaping to my feet like a midnight showing of Norma Rae on TNT. I do believe I've got me a wee crush on Lara Logan. (I assume my wife will forgive me; she's currently swooning over the fellow that plays the "Night Detective" on BBC America. Fair's fair.)

The cause of my infatuation is not merely Ms. Logan's pulchritude, although that is considerable. It's that she clearly takes great pride in her job and has had it up to her cargo vest with right-wing macaws repeating, ad nauseam, the craven falsehood that the problem with Iraq lies not with our war, dear reader, but with the coverage of it. As if sixty people a day weren't dying in that country in the civil conflict they placidly deny exists. Now that my family's got a member serving in our American armed forces in Baghdad (and a shout out to you, Funky, if you're reading), my patience for such outright butchery of the truth is running somewhat short. So is Ms. Logan's, thank goodness - and in the linked clip, from Kurtz's Reliable Sources show on CNN, she demonstrates herself to be a most reliable source indeed.

Of South African birth and sporting an impressive resumé, Ms. Logan lets loose a controlled yet appropriately passionate defense of herself and her colleagues that leaves Mr. Kurtz practically speechless (to be fair, the effect is abetted by a five second time delay, as Ms. Logan is speaking via satellite from a Baghdad rooftop). Wish we made 'em like her in America. (And yes, I'm looking at you, Laurie Dhue, my erstwhile classmate and Jessica Savitch-manqué, who hath leaped from the dubious frying pan of Fox News updates into the pathetic fire of Geraldo at Large; hope it's all been worth losing your soul over, Laurie).

Politics

Excuses, Excuses

2005-12-21T23:31:00.000-08:00

Just so you have some vague idea of why I would disappear for so long... Say hello to Little Lady Hotspur.

Destroying Our Democracy in Order to Save It

2005-12-21T23:07:00.000-08:00

If you're like me, you've shut down. (No jokes; I know how long it's been since my last post, and thanks - I missed you too.) Gone fishin'. Closed up shop and gone south for the winter. Figure you can't change the situation: Bush is it, Bush is gonna be it for over three more years, and with the GOP controlling all three branches of the Federal government, there's no point in wasting emotional energy fighting what can only be a losing battle. Might as well pack it in and wait until 2008, or at least 2006.

But.

But.

But.

In this Salon piece, Michelle Goldberg quotes smart people asking the key question. All this yammering about laws, about facts, about what it means to be an American - it's all come down to a crystalline point so hard and sharp, you could use it to etch the Bill of Rights onto the Hope Diamond. The president broke the law and violated the Constitution. The president, far from being contrite, is defiant about having done so. The president proclaims he will keep right on doing it, and that no one is in a position to stop him.

The rubber has met the road, ladies and gentlemen. This is what it comes down to: In the clearest possible terms, your president has proudly acknowledged destroying this democracy in order to save it.

Which means there is only one question left:

What are we - what are YOU - going to do about it?

A Heartbeat Away

2005-06-28T10:22:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I know - it's been a month since I posted. Some of you have been kind enough to point that out in a gentle and appreciative way, and I thank you. The truth is, there are several reasons why I've been derelict in my duty.

First, I got a new gig - I won't go into the details, but let's just say you should be very afraid - and while I've been having a ball, I've been so busy lately I've had no time to post. Second, frankly, this blog had been sliding toward filterhood for a while - you know, one of those snarky Gawker-type deals where the whole thing just consists of as many tiny postings as one can find (or receive in one's inbox from amateur publicists) and write some sarcastic little in-joke about. My intention was always for Naked Singularity to be more reflective than that, for it to be about thoughtful analysis, not a tangled mass of self-satisfied hyperlinks, hit count be damned. And NS was getting away from that, so I felt a slight reboot wasn't out of order.

Third, and by no means least, there hasn't been a lot going on that I felt anyone needed to hear from me about. The tragedy in Iraq, the Downing Street Memo, Bush's plunging ratings, Episode III sucking less than its predecessors (and ain't that damning with faint praise), Crash and Batman Begins rocking the world, Nikka Costa's new album being the Fat Man and Little Boy of modern pop-funk-soul-rock - these things have all been either self-evident or adequately covered by the Mainstream Media (well, except Nikka's record, but plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose). I've always seen my purpose here as at least partly to point out issues or points of view that may not be getting the play they deserve in the media at large, and I haven't felt an urgent need for that of late.

But today's a new day, and Salon's War Room is reporting today that no less august a super sleuth than Arianna Huffington spotted your Vice President being rushed off the tarmac to a Colorado hospital for emergency EKGs and the like. It's not a smoking crash cart paddle, I'll grant you, but we all know the likelihood of Dick Cheney completing two terms was chancy at best.

So I'll go out on a limb here, because I love using the phrase "you heard it here first" and I'm so rarely proven right in the fullness of time. But here's my prognostication: sometime before January, 2008, Dick Cheney will resign for health reasons - and George W. Bush, who seems determined to see himself as a battler for diversity despite evidence to the contrary, will name to replace him your Secretary of State, Miss Condoleeza Rice. Dr. Rice will then become both the first black and the first female Vice President in American history, thus throwing the race for the Republican nomination in 2008 into complete chaos.

You heard it here first.

News; Politics; News and politics

Chung-Chung!

2005-05-27T11:56:00.000-07:00

Well, let there be no doubt about who's responsible for the multiple messes the world is in. First we found out that the ongoing FUBAR SNAFU in Iraq and surrounding regions was Newsweek's fault. (Whew! Finally, somebody set the record straight! It's so helpful to have the Bushies and their ilk to show us where to direct our mindless rage.)

Now Tom DeLay makes it clear that the real bad guys in all this judge-killin' weren't the psychopaths who pulled the various triggers, and certainly weren't the ones calling in coded language for the judges to be killed (like him).

Nope, the real bad guys are the media.

From Reuters:

"DELAY CLASHES WITH NBC OVER 'LAW & ORDER'
"By Steve Gorman, Reuters

"LOS ANGELES (May 26) - House Majority Leader Tom DeLay accused NBC on Thursday of slurring his name by including an unflattering reference to him on the NBC police drama 'Law & Order: Criminal Intent.'

"DeLay's name surfaced on Wednesday night on the show's season finale, which centered on the fictional slayings of two judges by suspected right-wing extremists.

"In the episode, police are frustrated by a lack of clues, leading one officer to quip, 'Maybe we should put out an APB (all-points-bulletin) for somebody in a Tom DeLay T-shirt.'

"In a letter to NBC Universal Television Group President Jeff Zucker, DeLay wrote: 'This manipulation of my name and trivialization of the sensitive issue of judicial security represents a reckless disregard for the suffering initiated by recent tragedies and a great disservice to public discourse.'

"The Texas Republican went on to suggest the 'slur' against him was intended as a jab at comments he had made about 'the need for Congress to closely monitor the federal judiciary.'

"NBC Entertainment President Kevin Reilly responded in a statement that the dialogue in question 'was neither a political comment nor an accusation.'

"'The script line involved an exasperated detective bedeviled by a lack of clues, making a sarcastic comment about the futility of looking for a suspect when no specific description existed,' Reilly said.

"He added: 'It's not unusual for "Law & Order" to mention real names in its fictional stories. We're confident in our viewers' ability to distinguish between the two.'

"The show, which frequently incorporates stories and themes ripped from the headlines, aired weeks after a white supremacist was sentenced to 40 years in prison for plotting to assassinate a federal judge whose husband and elderly mother were later slain by another man angry at the judge.

"That judge, Joan Lefkow, appeared earlier this month before the Senate Judiciary Committee to rebuke politicians and other public figures who have used inflammatory language to criticize judicial decisions they disagreed with. She said such rhetoric encouraged violence against judges.

"Some leading Republicans used harsh terms to condemn judges earlier this year after courts failed to intervene to save the life of Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged Florida woman who died after her feeding tube was removed at her husband's request but against her parents' wishes.

"At the time, DeLay said, 'The time will come for the men responsible for this to answer for their behavior.'

Producer Dick Wolf, creator of the 'Law & Order' franchise, took a swipe at DeLay in his own statement on Thursday, saying, 'I ... congratulate Congressman DeLay for switching the spotlight from his own problems to an episode of a TV show.'

"The flap came as ethics questions swirling around DeLay mounted with a Texas judge ruling on Thursday that a political action committee formed by the congressman violated state law by failing to disclose $600,000 in mostly corporate donations.

"The show's season finale drew 14.5 million viewers, but DeLay wasn't one of them. An aide said he heard about the show through his wife, who learned of it from someone else who saw the episode."

(Check out the big lip on Dick Wolf! And I do believe he's a Republican to boot. Just goes to show, "Republican" and "fundamentally insane" don't have to go together like Scott McClellan and James Guckert.)

Now, notwithstanding that I do work in the quote-unquote entertainment industry, kids, I'm no media apologist. I think the state of broadcast TV in general (and broadcast news in particular) is such that every network exec and soi-disant TV journalist in America ought to be walking around with a paper bag over his/her head in shame. (Which also explains why The Daily Show, which is first and foremost a satirical chronicler of said shameful media hackitude, is not only the best but the most profoundly urgent TV show since The Simpsons.)

Having said that, I gotta hand it to DeLay. Even in a party known for surviving scandals by simply being brazenly unapologetic about the dastardly shite they've been caught red-handed at, DeLay sets a new standard. The man is simply unparalleled in his willingness to shift the spotlight onto somebody - anybody - else. If he was discovered in a Capitol Hill washroom in a heavy-petting three-way with McClellan and Guckert, I have no doubt he'd blame it all on the woman who planted the severed finger in the chili at Wendy's.

And he'd get away with it, too. 'Cause the media would lick that chili up.

News; Politics; News and politics; Television; TV

I Think I'm Getting a Military-Industrial Complex

2005-05-24T11:23:00.000-07:00

Pop quiz, politico savants. Who said:

""Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are [a] few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid."

The answer, of course, is President Dwight D. Eisenhower, on November 8, 1954.

You know, when the wisest president your party has put up in nearly a century is a guy who spent most of his two terms on the golf course, you're in a bad way.

On the other hand, look at those "stupid" Texas oil millionaires now, Ma!

Filibuster? I Hardly Filiknow Her!

2005-05-18T17:02:00.000-07:00

God forbid tiny fringe news outlets like CNN, The Associated Press, and NPR - NPR! - should get their facts right on niggling details like who coined the phrase "nuclear option"; we let it slide because the Mainstream Media are like those sibling-cousins everybody else in your extended family knows are a little slow; we can't just bust on 'em because we're sort of related and all.

But the Senate Republicans are another issue, thank Tip O'Neill (hey, if they can reject evolution, we can reject being genetically related to them; works both ways). And therefore let us be grateful for David Brock (it's really true what they say: there's no liberal convert like a gay ex-Republican liberal convert) and his watchdog website, Media Matters, which, Salon's War Room informs us, has assembled a dandy little rebuttal to the GOP filibuster battle disinformation that's been of late lying around and, shock of shocks, getting reprinted verbatim in the MSM.

The Media Matters fact sheet sets the record straight on malarkey big ("Why, the Democrats' filibusterin' of President Bush's judicial nominees is simply unprecedented!") and small ("Oh yeah? Well... well... We confirmed a lot more of Clinton's judges!"). It won't shut Frist and company up, but at least now if you're being attacked by a frothing GOP senator (and really, is there any other kind?), you know where to get some ammunition for the showdown.

Politics
News and politics

(Insert "Loan Shark" Joke Here)

2005-05-18T16:30:00.000-07:00

THIS JUST IN: There are some weird freakin' people in this country.

From Salon:

"MOTHER: WENDY'S FINGER USED TO SETTLE DEBT

"May 18, 2005 | San Jose, Calif. -- A Pennsylvania woman says her son -- who lost a fingertip in a work accident -- gave the digit to the husband of the Las Vegas woman now accused of planting it in a cup of Wendy's chili to settle a $50 debt.

"'My son is the victim in this,' Brenda Shouey told the San Francisco Chronicle for a story Wednesday. 'I believe he got caught in something, and he didn't understand what was going on.'

"Shouey said her son, Brian Paul Rossiter, 36, of Las Vegas, lost part of his finger when his gloved hand was caught in a mechanical truck lift in December at a paving firm where he worked with James Plascencia, the husband of Anna Ayala, who was arrested last month and was set to be arraigned Wednesday. Plascencia was arrested earlier this month on unrelated charges of failing to pay child support in a previous relationship.

"San Jose police announced last week the finger was obtained from an associate of Plascencia, but they have refused to identify him because he is cooperating in the investigation.

"Shouey said her son was desperate for cash when he gave his finger away.

"'He had a money problem. He owed $50 to this character, James,' Shouey said, adding she just learned of her son's involvement when he called her Monday night.

"Shouey declined to give details of how the finger was preserved, the nature of her son's debt, or whether Rossiter knew why Plascencia allegedly wanted the finger. She said her son is keeping a low profile after undergoing intense police questioning in the case.

"'My son is a happy-go-lucky guy. He thought it was cute to show' the severed finger, Shouey said. 'It's like a man thing. If a woman had her finger severed, she would never show it to anyone. But he would show it to the girls in the office if they asked.'"

It's "like a man thing"? Is she serious? I'm a man, last time I checked, and in the distasteful eventuality I found myself the victim of an industrial accident and suddenly dedigitated, I cannot imagine "showing it to the girls in the office" as some sort of bizarre flirting behavior.

And are there really women out there who would, upon seeing a bloody, severed finger, reward its owner with their company and/or sexual favors?

Can I get a show of hands? Er, fingers?

News

Fubascists!

2005-05-17T00:45:00.000-07:00

God bless Bill Moyers for refusing to take the Bush administration's attempts to muzzle him and turn PBS and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting into yet another right-wing line-toeing propaganda stream spouting the perspectives of Fortune 500 companies on a channel paid for by Joe and Jenny Taxpayer. Christ, but this government makes me sick.

Politics

We Aren't Siamese, If You Please

2005-05-17T00:08:00.000-07:00

THIS JUST IN: Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas have actually voted differently on a case before the Court, casting into doubt the long-established theory that they are in fact conjoined twins, perhaps even using the same single brain. (To be fair, comparisons of their respective speeches - based on clandestine recordings smuggled out of Bob Jones University by three liberals working undercover as closeted gay Republicans - have rendered that last bit rather unlikely.)

For their next trick, Naked Singularity has learned, Thomas will appear on American Idol, where he plans to sing the Destiny's Child hit "Bootylicious" while Scalia drinks a glass of water.

(And yes, I know the appropriate term is "conjoined." For that matter, Thailand isn't Siam anymore, either. Sheesh.)

Politics

Tell Me Why I Don't Like Monday (Brunch)

2005-05-16T09:35:00.000-07:00

A smattering of the wise, the weird, and the wonderful from the World Wide Web. Wow! (Free reggie required for the N.Y. Times stuff.)

• Paul Krugman restores balance to the Force by actually discussing the Downing Street Memo in the pages of the Gray Lady. (Naked Singularity, of course, hipped you to it days ago.) Incredibly, no Sulzburger has yet been struck down by lightning for this breach of Mainstream Media etiquette, although the day is still young. Of course, the Other Times's reluctance to talk about the Bushies' now inarguably cooked-up case for war in Iraq is understandable, since the Other Times itself, as we know, contributed to that misbegotten conflict by reporting the crap that was oozing daily from the mouths of Bush, Cheney, Rummy, Wolfie, and li'l Scott McClellan. Oh, the wages of sin are high, and don't begin to cover the nut for an 800-square-foot walk-up on the Upper West Side.

• The Gray Lady also finally gets around to covering the East Waynesville, N.C., Baptist Church scandal; apparently poor Rev. Chan Chandler has been forced to resign for telling his parishioners that God didn't want them if they didn't vote for Bush, and the nine members he had kicked out have been invited back, along with the forty or so who had left the congregation in protest. Chandler plans to start a new church with some of the members who backed him all along - a group which includes, distressingly, most of the youngest of the flock. I don't fully understand what's happened to the place I grew up in, but it seems clear that all that stands between the south and total regression to the Dark Ages is older folks who remember Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman. Soon I may never be able to go home again.

• In happier religious news, Nick Kristof spotlights the ever-provocative Bishop Spong's new book, The Sins of Scripture: Exposing the Bible's Texts of Hate to Reveal the God of Love. Seeing liberal Christians fighting to take back their faith from the righty wackos never fails to bring a smile to my hot little lips.

• In a not unrelated Sunday column, Frank Rich takes on the Christian Right's anti-gay frothing, documenting their 30-year effort to demonize homosexuality which is now coming to a boil as a chief offensive in the culture war. He also drags into the harsh light of scrutiny the phenomenon, not new but just lately starting to come out of the closet (as it were), of the Christian Right's loudest anti-gay crusaders being either relatives of gay people (Phyllis Schlafly, Randell Terry, Alan Keyes) or, once the truth doth out, gay themselves (Terry Dolan, Arthur Finkelstein, James E. West). Not that there's anything wrong with that.

• Here in Gomorrah West, the mayoral race is just about over, with City Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa poised to take the job he should have won four years ago and kick Jimmy "The Guttersnake" Hahn to the curb in the process. This, of course, hasn't stopped Hahn from once again trying to defame Villaraigosa with depraved and sleazy eleventh-hour attack ads; this time around, he has a weeping mother of a shooting victim telling Angelenos that Antonio loves child-killers. What is it about politics that brings out the best in our public servants?

• And finally, it's Monday, and this is Naked Singularity - two excellent reasons to provide a link to this week's This Modern World, which tweaks the Right's "War on Rationality." I am in deep gratitude to Tom Tomorrow and, indeed, anyone else who can make laughing matters out of cultural trends which are, in truth, so massively frightening.

Welcome to the Boomtown, folks.

Politics

Try Our Tri-Tip!

2005-05-13T16:21:00.000-07:00

Mystery solved. Now you can enjoy your weekend.

From the Associated Press via Salon:

"FINGER TRACED TO WOMAN WHO BLAMES WENDY'S

"By Greg Sandoval

"May 13, 2005 | San Jose, Calif. -- The finger that a woman said she found in a bowl of Wendy's chili came from an associate of her husband who lost the digit in an industrial accident, police said Friday.

"'The jig is up. The puzzle pieces are beginning to fall into place,' Police Chief Rob Davis said.

"The man is from Nevada and lost a part of his finger in an accident last December, Davis said. His identity was traced through a tip made to Wendy's hot line, he said.

"He said authorities 'positively confirmed that this subject was in fact the source of the fingertip.'

"Anna Ayala, the woman who said she found the finger, was arrested last month at her suburban Las Vegas home.

"Ayala said she bit down on a 1 1/2 inch-long finger fragment while dining with her family in March at a San Jose Wendy's.

"But authorities had said they believed the story was a hoax.

"Wendy's had offered $100,000 for information on the origin of the finger."

Okay, a fingertip. That I can believe. Finally, a little sanity is restored to Dave's World.

News

This Is Your Government On Drugs

2005-05-13T13:45:00.000-07:00

You're not going to believe this.

I heard Randi Rhodes talking about this on Air America yesterday. It was a rerun of the Monday show, I think. My question is, why was I hearing about it for the first time on Thursday? What the hell do CNN and MSNBC and ABC News and CBS News and NBC News do all day? (I know what Fox News does.)

Okay. Breathe, Hotspur.

Here's the offending interchange, from an official transcript of Tim Russert's "Meet the Press" program broadcast this past Sunday, May 8th. Mother's Day. The guest is Gary Schroen, a 32 year CIA veteran and the author of "First In: An Insider's Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan."

MR. RUSSERT: On September 1, 2001, you began a 90-day phaseout retiring from the CIA. Then came the horrific day of 8:46 AM, September 11, 2001. All our lives changed. You were asked to stay on at the CIA. On September 13th, you were summoned to the office of Cofer Black, the head of counterterrorism for the CIA. What did he tell you? What was your mission?

MR. SCHROEN: The mission was to--the first part of it was to go in and link up with the Northern Alliance, formerly headed by Ahmed Al-Massoud, and to win their confidence and their agreement to cooperate militarily with us. They were the only armed force on the ground in Afghanistan opposing the Taliban. The second part of it was, once the Taliban were broken, to attack the al-Qaeda organization, find bin Laden and his senior lieutenants and kill them.

MR. RUSSERT: Kill them?

MR. SCHROEN: Kill them.

MR. RUSSERT: Wasn't it illegal for us to kill foreign leaders?

MR. SCHROEN: I don't think at that point that the--I think the administration had gotten to the point where bin Laden and his guys were fair game.

MR. RUSSERT: As part of war?

MR. SCHROEN: As part of war.

MR. RUSSERT: Mr. Black gave you specific instructions on what he wanted you to bring home.

MR. SCHROEN: That's true. He did ask that once we got bin Laden and killed him, that we send his head back in a cardboard box on dry ice so that he could take it down and show the president.

MR. RUSSERT: Where would you find the dry ice in Afghanistan?

MR. SCHROEN: That's what I mentioned to him. I said, "Cofer, I think that I can come up with pikes to put the heads of the lieutenants on," which is the second part of what he wanted done. "Dry ice, we'll have to improvise."

Now here are my real questions. What kind of country are we, that we elected twice (well, once) a president who WANTS the severed, bloody head of an enemy brought to him in a cardboard box? Who WANTS the severed, bloody heads of said enemy's lieutenants brought to him on pikes? Who the hell does Bush think he is? Caligula?

And - I'm copping from Randi on this one, but it's the question that popped into my head, too, when I first heard the tape of the show - what the hell is Russert thinking? What kind of ludicrous follow-up to the disclosure of our president's wanting our enemy's severed head brought to him in a box is Russert's "Where would you find the dry ice in Afghanistan?" If it's not apparent from the text, it was clear even listening to the playback on radio that Russert was making a little joke; he seemed utterly unfazed by the revelation that had just been plopped in his lap. Russert, the alleged bulldog interviewer, doesn't even bite a little at the news that the leader of the free world and his minions are freaking barbarians?

I mean, come on. If I hadn't heard the tape myself, I don't think I would have believed it.

What in the world are we doing?

Politics

Repent! (Sort Of)

2005-05-11T12:34:00.000-07:00

Well, it looks like the Reverend Chan Chandler of the East Waynesville, N.C., Baptist Church - you remember, the one who told his parishioners who supported John Kerry to repent or be kicked out of the congregation - has revised and extended his remarks. Unfortunately for him, his previous statements were captured for posterity.

As Salon's War Room says today:

"Chan Chandler, the Baptist pastor who recently banished nine congregants from his North Carolina church for their failure to support President Bush, appeared to change his gospel this past weekend. He told the Associated Press that the incident was a 'great misunderstanding,' and invited the excommunicated members -- who say they were booted for supporting John Kerry last fall -- back into the church for Sunday services. According to Cox News Service, on Sunday Chandler apparently preached reconciliation, urging congregants to 'love on each other' -- which everyone apparently then did, 'circulating for about five minutes, shaking hands and hugging.'"

(To my ear, that's creepily reminiscent of President Bush's skeevy campaign comment in Poplar Bluff, Mo., on Sept. 6, 2004, to wit, "Too many gynecologists aren't able to practice their love with women all across this country.")

"According to the AP, over the weekend Chandler also denied ever having enforced guidelines from a partisan pulpit. 'No one has ever been voted from the membership of this church due to an individual's support or lack of support for a political party or candidate,' he said in a statement through his lawyer.

"He didn't address the fact that, during a taped sermon in October 2004, he admonished, 'If you vote for John Kerry this year, you need to repent or resign.'"

But that's not all. It got worse:

"'We've been catering to Satan, catering to the enemy, we've not been making the stand that God wants us to make,' Chandler told his flock at the height of campaign season. Later, he added, 'If you're going to be offended today, take it up with the most high. I am merely the spokesperson. Don't kill the messenger.' Chandler also offered these remarks for Kerry supporters in the pews: 'Why do you support an unbeliever over a believer? Let me see, do I support a Christian or a non-Christian? Do I support someone who kills babies or I support someone who says, "Let's let 'em live." Do I support someone who says, "Let's marry the gays," or someone who says, "Let's uphold God's law and not"?'"

So what's to be done? How do we deal with this two-bit rabble-rouser? Help may be on the way - from an unlikely source...

"On Monday, Americans United for Separation of Church and State sent a letter to the IRS asking the agency to investigate the matter, on grounds that Chandler's comments violated the no-electioneering laws governing churches and other charities.

"'Pastor Chandler seems to have confused his church with a Republican Party caucus meeting,' said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, the group's executive director, in a statement. 'It's time for the IRS to give him a swift reminder of the laws of the land.'"

Nice work, Rev. Lynn. You know, it's funny; we Americans bad-mouth the Internal Revenue Service all the time, but they brought down Al Capone and now they just may be ready to put this jerk in his place. Maybe it's time we all re-evaluated our opinion of the IRS...

(On the other hand, let's not go all hog-wild.)

Religion

The Blunder of the Beast

2005-05-09T23:35:00.000-07:00

Have some sympathy for the millions of evangelicals the world over who are presumably picking up the shards of their fractured existence. According to pithy McDigest The Week:

"Bad week for biblical literalists, after historians studying a newly discovered fragment of the oldest surviving copy of the New Testament announced that the legendary 'mark of the beast' is probably 616, rather than 666."

Holy white raisins! As faithful Naked Singularity reader Jason H. of San Diego put it, this must mean all those little anti-Christs running around will have to stop torturing the neighbor's Doberman and get their tattoos laser-erased and altered. What a massive pain in the forked tail.

Seriously, don't you just hate it when thousands of years of alarmist religious propaganda are rendered moot in the twinkling of a red, slit-pupiled eye? If the Bible is indeed the divinely inspired Word of God, every syllable to be taken as literal truth, it's no simple matter to call for rewrite on one of the Good Book's oftest-quoted little bon mots. (Not to mention, poor Iron Maiden is going to have to re-record one of their best songs. There, there, Eddie.)

Once you start revising this stuff, where do you stop? Next they'll be telling us that Jacob thumb-wrestled the angel, or that Pilate didn't so much wash his hands as use one of those lemon-scented hot towelettes the geishas start you off with at Benihana. Or that Mary was just a teenager who couldn't bear to tell her parents her boyfriend knocked her up...

Ahem.

Religion

Another Day, Another Impeachable Offense

2005-05-07T21:09:00.000-07:00

Ho-hum. While your big American Mainstream Media was sleeping, Faithful Reader(s), the Rupert Murdoch-owned Times of London was uncovering a three-year-old memo containing the minutes of a July 2002 meeting of the Blair Cabinet. As Salon's Joe Conason reports:

"...Those in attendance included the defense secretary, the foreign secretary, the attorney general, the intelligence chief and Blair's closest personal aides.

"The minutes of that meeting, set down in a memorandum by foreign policy advisor Matthew Rycroft, were circulated to all who were present. Dated July 23, 2002, the Rycroft memo begins with the following admonishment: 'This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents...'

"What the minutes clearly show is that Bush and Blair secretly agreed to wage war for 'regime change' nearly a year before the invasion -- and months before they asked the United Nations Security Council to support renewed weapons inspections as an alternative to armed conflict (my italics). The minutes also reveal the lingering doubts over the legal and moral justifications for war within the Blair government.

"But for Americans, the most important lines in the July 23 minutes are those attributed to Sir Richard Dearlove, the head of the British Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6, who in spy jargon is to be referred to only as 'C.' The minutes indicate that Sir Richard had discovered certain harsh realities during a visit to the United States that summer:

"'C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the U.N. route ... There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.'

"At the same meeting, British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw confirmed Sir Richard's assessment:

"'The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss this with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran.'"

It will not shock you to hear that this little bombshell caused enough of a stir earlier in the week in Great Britain, where it was front-page, "our-top-story" stuff all over the media, that for a brief moment there was actually some question as to whether it might keep Blair from being re-elected. In the event, he kept his job (albeit with a smaller majority), but the fact that so many British subjects not only understood the import of this memo, but cared about its implications for their government and their country, only supports my contention that the average Brit's IQ is at least twenty points higher than the average American's. (I figure it's either the bangers or the mash.)

Now, when I walked into a studio in Santa Monica on Friday morning, having just heard a friend of mine discuss this development on a nationally sydicated radio show during my drive in, I repeated it for my colleagues, wonderful people all and none-too-slow on the uptake. I was stunned to see it sink with barely a ripple; the general reaction was a collective shrug ("I didn't vote for president" was the only verbal response I got, from a twentysomething recently transplanted to L.A. from the upper Midwest).

Why, I wondered in concert with Joe Conason, doesn't anybody care about this in America?

Because in case you hadn't heard, this stuff is kerosene poured on an already blazing fire in the U.K., folks. Blair may have kept his job, but only because there was no serious alternative. Last week New Yorker editor David Remnick wrote a skeptical profile in that magazine on Blair and his re-election efforts, entitled "The Masochistic Campaign," and if Remnick has captured the P.M. at all, the man's on thin ice with his constituents and he knows it. When pressed to explain his continued fealty to the invasion of Iraq on grounds of destroying Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction - despite nearly universal agreement at this point that those weapons did not exist - Blair sticks nervously but stubbornly to his guns like an evangelical at a convention of evolutionary biologists. Saddam had W.M.D. before we attacked, he repeats doggedly, and then somehow, incredibly, managed to get rid of them by the time we got there. (One imagines Blair seeing David Copperfield disappear the Statue of Liberty on T.V., as happened some years back, and then calling Michael Bloomberg anxiously to offer Britain's full assistance in tracking it down.)

As Blair admits, in his mind September 11 changed everything; whereas before bin Laden's attacks he would have erred, as he says, on the side of non-action, he now feels compelled to err on the side of action. This seems an incisive insight as well into the mindset of the Bush administration, if we shall be charitable and grant their sincerity in the matter. As Blair puts it to Remnick, in the wake of the attacks the issue became simple: regimes which may present threats can no longer be permitted to stand, and since Saddam Hussein had been long known to represent at least a potential threat - and, crucially, was believed, according to what we now know was highly selective and frequently erroneous intelligence, to be in violation of United Nations resolutions - Blair had no choice but to line up behind Bush and go into Iraq. Under the stress of the aftermath of 9/11, the logic, paranoid and self-serving though it was, made sense to both leaders.

And thus they failed us. What the new revelation of the Downing Street memo makes unmistakably clear is not only that the decision to invade Iraq was made long before the tanks rolled into Baghdad - a fact well known to those of us familiar with Paul Wolfowitz's 1996 Project for a New American Century article laying out a thorough invasion blueprint lacking only the pretext so thoughtfully provided by Osama bin Laden - but that Bush and his representatives lied publicly, repeatedly, knowingly, about that decision. They intentionally misled the American public and the world, in order to invade a country which posed no threat, because the dictator they had installed there twenty years before had long since ceased to do what they told him to. (And, of course, because he had "tried to kill Dubya's dad.")

And now most Americans, and virtually all American media organizations, perhaps eager to forget their own complicity at the time, are ignoring the story. We don't like being reminded that we're not always the good guys. We don't like that at all. We don't like it so much, we're willing to turn two blind eyes to the worst president since Herbert Hoover, just so we won't have to look ourselves in the mirror and face what we see there.

But straw boaters off to the Brits, who at least have the decency to act properly ashamed of what their government did in their name. Would that we might show as much character as a nation.

Politics

Blessed Are The Bigots

2005-05-07T20:43:00.000-07:00

Sorry about the longish layoff, Faithful Reader(s). Sometimes one is lucky in having enough work that the luxuries of life, like blogging and sleep, have to take a back seat for a while. Silly me, I was afraid that by the time I had a moment to post, there might be nothing going on worth posting about.

Fortunately, the morons of the world just keep chugging along, doing the moronic things that they do. Down in North Carolina, ABC affiliate WLOS-TV is reporting that the Reverend Chan Chandler, pastor of the East Waynesville Baptist Church, has given nine members of his flock an ultimatum: support George W. Bush, or resign their church membership. To their credit, many of the church's congregation are disputing Chandler's right under Southern Baptist bylaws to cast members out for political disagreement with their preacher; more than forty members have left East Waynesville Baptist in protest, proving once again that most southerners, and most Christians, are not as stupid or intolerant as the idiots who claim to lead them. Rev. Chandler has had no comment, other than to assert that his "actions were not politically motivated."

Blessed are the bigots, for they shall make asses of themselves.

Religion

Level 42

2005-05-02T23:20:00.000-07:00

The weekend is over and the money crunchers at Disney are kicking up their heels. The long-awaited film adaptation of Douglas Adams's 1980 novel The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy arrived in theaters on Friday, and it soundly thrashed XXX: State of the Union at the box office, to the surprise of everyone in Hollywood, none of whom would ever be caught dead reading a piece of geek cult fodder like Hitchhiker's. (Who am I kidding? Make that: none of whom would ever be caught dead reading.) Oblivious as they are to the fact that Hitchhiker's $21.7 million total is probably more a reflection of a huge fanbase who've been waiting twenty-five years to see this film than a true indicator of its global financial legs, the denizens of the Hollywood brain trust are busy reading all the wrong messages from this.

(My favorite quote, from Rory Breuer, Head of Distribution for Sony, whose Vin Diesel-less XXX brought in a measley 13.7 million: "Certainly, we're disappointed, because it's a film we all believed in. We have Ice Cube, who is a big star, and I think he's one of those rare actors who really can do just about anything." Yeah, Rory, those of us who couldn't get enough of his Hamlet at Lincoln Center last year are just as shocked. Not to mention his Willy Loman at the Long Wharf: a revelation, pure and simple. Sigh... Just another case of the spaceman keepin' the brother-man down.)

In any case, the movie itself, for those of you who care, is a bit of a mixed bag; certainly it's bound to provoke some lively after-theater coffee conversation, especially if you or your date is a fan of the book. The reactions of the fan community, and reviewers in general, have been all over the map. Some Adams enthusiasts, including several close friends of his and/or participants in the first BBC radio play version of the story, have proclaimed it to be all the author would have hoped, had he not died of a heart attack on a treadmill in the gym of a Santa Barbara hotel in 2001 (he had a hand in the script before his death). Even some reviewers who have no particular love of the book seem amused. Others, however, don't see what all the fuss is about, saying the movie isn't bad, just not that... funny. And some hardcore fans have been outraged at what they perceived as a hailstorm of radical plot changes.

There are plot changes, it's true, but they don't amount to much: a couple of extra characters (John Malkovich's Humma Kavula, the heretofore unnamed opponent defeated by Sam Rockwell's Zaphod Beeblebrox in his campaign to become President of the Galaxy, and Anna Chancellor's Questular Rontok, Zaphod's heretofore unnamed vice president and would-be lover - neither of whom matter much in the grand scheme of things), a modified love triangle (between Zaphod, Zooey Deschanel as Trillian, and Martin Freeman's Arthur Dent, the putative protagonist), an added prop (the Point-of-View gun, which zaps one's quarry with a few minutes of seeing things from his attacker's perspective). And anyway, as Adams often said, every version of the Hitchhiker's universe, from the radio plays to the books to the BBC TV mini-series to this, has been altered to fit its medium; the results are best seen, he advised, as alternate-universe versions of the same basic story.

Adams wrote for, and was clearly influenced by, Monty Python; the sense of humor of the books is wry, subtle, and fairly intellectual if supremely silly. The difficulty of translating that tone successfully to film was one major cause for the length of time it took to get this movie made, and constituted perhaps the main reason many fans of the books feared - or hoped - that a cinematic version would never come to pass. Does it work? In some aspects, yes - but perhaps not surprisingly, it often works best where the filmmakers, U.K. video-meisters Garth Jennings and Nick Goldsmith, A.K.A. "Hammer & Tongs," and co-screenwriter Karey Kirkpatrick, come up with new, more cinematic whimsies in that same ol' Janx spirit.

The movie opens, for example, with a song-and-dance number, "So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish" (hear it here), performed by the dolphins of Earth immediately prior to their fleeing our planet, which, being the second-most intelligent Earth species (humans are only the third), they know is about to be demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass. (If that strikes you as funny, you'll probably like the movie.) Another good example is the handling of the titular Guide itself, a sort of e-book which has been elegantly rendered not only with Stephen Fry's tone-perfect voice-over of the entries, but also with Flash-like animation which does not simply visualize the narration but complements it. The entry on the Improbablity Drive which propels the protagonists' spaceship Heart of Gold, for instance, verbally describes the Drive's conception as the result of long hours of lonely, thankless work even as it visually depicts its socially maladroit scientist-creators banging on their lab ceiling with a mop handle in anger at a raucous party upstairs - a party of the sort to which, the Guide mentions sadly, they are never invited. (Again, if this strikes you as funny, you'll like the movie.)

But the possibility for such visual additions points up the reason fan reactions can be so all over the map. A lot of the fans who disapprove of the movie seem to do so because the characters and scenes don't look like what they imagined in their heads. (I will allow this was a reaction I shared.) Peter Jackson got around this by bringing in long-time Lord of the Rings artists to generate conceptual art and design cues for his adaptation of the Tolkien saga, and the result was legions of blissful fans who were treated to the spectacle of already familiar visualizations being brought to life.

The Hitchhiker's crew couldn't do that, however, for two reasons. One, there is not the same wealth of fan-generated or -approved art out there for Adams's books. Two, Adams himself was not a very visual writer. Read the books again now and you'll be struck by the thoroughly verbal nature of the enterprise (which did, to be fair, start out as a radio play). The physical descriptions are few and far between (contrast them to Tolkien's, which went on for whole chapters at a time). Adams tends to describe things in a manner calculated for humorous value, not visual fulsomeness:

"Space," the introduction to the Guide states, "is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space. Listen..."

Funny, yes, but if you don't know what outer space looks like beforehand, you're not likely to be able to imagine it more effectively now. And when it comes to things we haven't seen before - like, say, Marvin the Paranoid Android (voiced by Alan Rickman), one's of Adams's most inspired creations, a robot prototype with personality programming whose demeanor is at once egomaniacal and morose - well, all Adams gives us is the word "android" and the fact of two little red triangular-shaped eyes. The reader has plenty of room to draw in the rest in her imagination, and legions of fans have done just that. (Mine looks like See-Threepio.) Fine and dandy for a book - but when a movie, as it must, fills in all those missing details, the result can be significantly at variance with what the reader pictured.

The filmmakers worsen the situation by frequently changing what little was actually described in the books. The Heart of Gold, which Adams wrote looked something like a giant running shoe, has been rendered here as a giant sphere, for instance. Marvin's eyes, while indeed triangular, are green instead of red, for no apparent reason. That's not such a big deal; that his head has been rendered as another giant sphere in what is either design continuity or a crass attempt at selling Marvin plushies or both, however, is. (Much of the film's design work is, in fact, inspired, but one wonders why the filmmakers chose to depart so freely from what few concrete cues they actually had.)

And then there's the issue of taking characters written as British and turning them into Americans. This seems to bother a lot of fans, particularly in England, and I can understand their pain. The script turns some of these changes into virtues (Arthur, on finding out his friend Ford Prefect (Mos Def) is not from Guildford, as he has been led to believe, but rather from a small planet in the vicinity of Betelgeuse: "Well, that explains the accent..."), and the actors are winning enough that I, for one, was not bothered. Of course I'm American, so as I read the book for the first time at the age of twelve, in my mind, I must confess, so too was Trillian. Ford, being an alien, was kind of fuzzy for me, his bland car-model name somehow connoting the aregionality of TV spokesmen; thus Mos Def jibes okay with the vision in my head. Your mileage may vary.

I always had very specific ideas on Zaphod, however, who is described by Adams as a sort of hippie rock-star type with a megawatt smile and a rather small brain; I used to picture him as a two-headed, Plastic Ono Band-era John Lennon. Sam Rockwell, never short on creativity, has made him instead a 70s southern rocker - he would look very much in place onstage with .38 Special - and added a Dubya-esque accent that, while entirely outside Adams's intentions, matches nicely with the character's cluelessness. The resolution of the love triangle in this telling, combined with Rockwell's choices, makes Zaphod less the charming rogue of the books, however, than just an amusing doofus, a change which does not redound to the story's benefit.

By far the most successful characterization belongs to Bill Nighy, who takes Slartibartfast, craftsman of coastlines and a bit of a cypher in the book, and makes of him a living, breathing, slightly befuddled tinkerer who takes justifiable pride in his work. He's like a shy Swiss watchmaker, the latest of a long line of master artisans who derives all his happiness from a well-placed cog, and he somehow embodies the sweetness of Adams's worldview in a way that no one else - not even Freeman as Arthur - manages to do. If there's a sequel, I have one request: more Slartibartfast, please.

One could quibble over this or that detail, but I like forests more than trees, so I won't. My moviegoing companions were split in their reactions; Sweetness & Light, like myself a fan who had not read the books in a long time, was fairly pleased overall, while Big Joe, a newbie, found the whole thing "just not that funny." I feared as much. The handling of the property is so loving and gentle that opportunities for excitement - which are not that plentiful to begin with and thus not to be squandered - are passed by in favor of maintaining the droll, meandering pace and tone of the original prose. The script, while incorporating several bits from Hitchhiker's sequels, unwisely omits two of the best action sequences from the second book, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe: one, in which our foursome escape the titular restaurant, Milliways, in a stolen spaceship programmed to be autopiloted into a supernova as part of a rock band's reeeeeeeally big stage show; the other, the sequence at Milliways itself, which was part of the original radio play and which plays something like a Vegas show directed by Terry Gilliam as diners protected in a temporal bubble watch the universe end over... and over... and over. This movie could have used the suspense and fun of these sequences, so I'll add to my break-in-case-of-sequel requests: Milliways, Disaster Area, and Hotblack Desiato, please.

Is The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy everything fans have hoped for? I'd have to say no. But it's no worse than the BBC TV show, and better than we had any reason to expect from Disney, the studio where live-action generally goes to die. Props to the Mouse for handing this project to Brits, who understand it best; points off for entrusting it to a director/producer team whose experience is all in commercials and music videos. (Someday some clever studio exec may actually figure out that making a two-hour movie requires a sense of long-form pacing and character that wunderkinder who've never made a film longer than three-and-a-half minutes simply haven't yet learned. Today, sadly, is not that day.) It's diverting, and yes, it's amusing in places. But it's not definitive, and probably never could be.

For that, you'll just have to read the book. Ain't that always the way?

Movies

Over One Thousand Served!

2005-04-30T10:29:00.000-07:00

It gives the staff here at Naked Singularity tremendous pleasure to announce the marking of a milestone: Late last night, while we were all off seeing The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, this site received its one-thousandth visitor!

(Brief pause for wild applause, cheers, catcalls, gushing confessions of love, etc.)

The lucky customer is a Mrs. Edith Turnipseed, 57, of French Lick, Indiana, who happened across Naked Singularity last night at exactly 11:23 pm, Central Standard Time, while performing a web search on Costa Rica for her granddaughter's 7th grade anti-drug report. One thing led to another. She uses AOL; what can I tell you?

Mrs. Turnipseed was more than gratified by the festivities surrounding her arrival. She writes: "As a contributor to the Family Research Council, I am pleased to see that the violence on your blog is minimal, and the sex largely restricted to mood, tone, and metaphor which no ordinary person can make any sense of, anyway. Points off for the word "naked" in the title, however. And I do wish you'd stop using such big words."

Criticism accepted in the spirit in which it was given. For her inadvertant singularity, Mrs. Turnipseed will recieve a 2001 Kia Spectra courtesy of Bigg Dogg's Pre-Owned Auto Mart in Macon, GA - retail value: $299.99!

Thanks for the visit, Mrs. T. And to the rest of you who contributed hits to the counter in this, perhaps the most auspicious blog launch in the history of modern media, we here at Naked Singularity salute you - and thank you, from the bottom of our hot little hearts, for your support.

You... you complete us.

Men of Steel

2005-04-29T14:25:00.000-07:00

It's Friday, and in a new Naked Singularity tradition I am hereby declaring, that means it's time for Hotspur to gush.

You might not know it from my erudite manner and Cary Grant-ish accent and physique, but your Friendly Neighborhood Fire God is something of a pop culture junkie. Being the generalist that I am, I can't claim to match the fanboy monomania of some of the Comic Book Store Guys out here in cyberspace, but the diary of my heart is replete with entries chronicling the crushes, infatuations, obsessions, heartaches, and long-term romances I've had with various denizens of the pop-cult multiverse. (Last week you met one, Nikka Costa.)

This week's torch is lit in honor of a coming attraction featuring one of my all-time favorite fictional creations: the son of Jor-El, the last survivor of Krypton, the original stranger in a strange land, the heir to Hercules and Beowulf and Galahad, the prototypical superhero.

Still don't know who I'm talking about? Check Shaquille O'Neal's bicep tattoo.

It's more than just the fact that, with the creation of Superman, whole genres - whole media, practically - came into being or gelled into their modern forms. His historical significance needs no elaboration. At one point in the 20th century, one pithy observer noted that there were three fictional names known to practically every human being on the face of the planet: Sherlock Holmes, Mickey Mouse, and Superman. That's all impressive, but my fondness for the character supercedes (as usual) any influence from elsewhere; even if he was the lowliest, most pathetic demigod in the comic book universe, I'd still love him best.

Almost alone most major superhero characters, Kal-El is not moonlighting when he's flying around in the cape - he is the cape. He's a good boy, saved by birth parents who sacrificed themselves that he might live, raised by loving foster parents who have no truck with moral ambivalence, and he wants badly to make all his parents proud of him. There is right, he is taught, and there is wrong; the right generally involves doing something to help someone else, and the wrong generally involves putting your own wants above the well-being of others (see my recently discussed list of political principles for elaboration and an insight into how this mindset has influenced my own). The problem, of course, is that he is fighting an unwinnable battle; he can never fully succeed at the mission his parents give him, because there's always someone else who needs saving (hell, three of his four parents are dead before he even gets out of high school, so he'll never even hear most of them tell him he's a good son).

So Superman is motivated not by a need for revenge, the chic raison du jour in this self-involved, paranoid era, but rather by an honest fealty to an ideal of what being a truly good person means. Superman has a dark side, but it's not the darkness of Batman or Daredevil or Wolverine - it's the Sisyphean weight of literally unfulfillable responsibility. Frank Miller, in the Dark Knight books, depicts him dismissively as a prig, a self-superior boy scout, but that's just because Miller can't wrap his brain around the man's situation, so obsessed is he with his own Catholic impulses of sin and expiation. In his vision, Batman and other heroes well acquainted with Superman's history always refer to him not as "Superman" or as "Kal-El" but as "Clark"; Miller doesn't get even the most basic fact of the character's identity. "Clark Kent" doesn't exist; he's an alias, a cypher. Superman, the real man, is an alien; he looks human enough to pass, but he never loses that sense of not belonging, of being an outsider, a poser. He is a great and a good man, but the moral politics of his calling require that he hide his light under a bushel, and he's forever unable to shake the constant, nagging fear of being found out. I find him fascinating and deeply sympathetic, and yeah, if you're into that cocktail party question, I would choose the power of flight faster than you could say "Rocketeer." I also dig the suit.

Anyway, enough armchair analysis. What I really came here to do is give you a peek at the new Superman.

Bryan Singer is currently directing Superman Returns for Warner Brothers in Australia (the writers are Michael Dougherty and Dan Harris, who previously worked on Singer's X2). After the way Joel Schumacher eviscerated all that was worthy in the Batman franchise - and God bless Chris Nolan, by the way, whose Batman Begins looks to set that train back on the rails this June - any fan of DC characters (and I'm one of the few who will admit to preferring them to Marvel's as a group) would be forgiven for feeling trepidation at the prospect of a new opportunity for Hollywood to screw up the greatest name in the pantheon. Happily, such pessimism seems thus far unwarranted. Singer professes a love for the first two Donner/Lester films from the 70s - indeed, he took the job knowing it might well queer his relationship with Fox and X3, which it did - and has proven it by publicly proclaiming his intention to use John Williams's spectacular theme music and to make his movie a sequel to Superman II. (But wait, the eagle-eyed among you shout; weren't there already sequels, viz. Supermen III and IV? Yes, and they sucked. That Singer knows this and has chosen to ignore them is further proof that he was the right man for the task.)

A few details about the Donner/Lester films. Richard Donner, now known as a very solid mainstream Hollywood director/producer, shot footage for both Superman and Superman II during principal photography for the first film. For reasons which are still in dispute, producers Ilya and Alexander Salkind took the second film away from him before the first had been released - the early buzz was negative, though it turned out to be wrong - and had Richard Lester (A Hard Day's Night) finish the job. I like both movies, but the fanboy contingent argues incessantly that Donner was unfairly screwed (which he was), that Lester was a catastrophe (which he wasn't), and that Warners ought to release the Donner version of Superman II, as if such a thing even existed.

But none of that hullabaloo mattered, ultimately, because of one man: Christopher Reeve.

It may surprise some of you to know that Reeve is a controversial figure in the disabled community; most able-bodied folks assume that he must have been as towering a hero to disabled people as he was to the rest of the world following his accident. In fact, that is not uniformly the case. Many disabled folks saw his insistence that he would one day walk again as a rejection of the realities of their lives and a tacit endorsement of the notion of disability as a fate worse than death. Regardless, my memories of Chris Reeve come dressed in a sky-blue leotard, and a more gratifying personification of the Man of Steel it is hard to conceive. He had the requisite height and he gained the requisite muscle, but Reeve was an accomplished stage actor and from the beginning he grasped the underlying truths of the character. His Clark Kent is a comic tour de force, but Reeve knows "Clark" is just an act; when the tie comes off and the cape comes out, Reeve believes totally in the essential goodness, the self-sacrificing decency, of the man he's playing. He simply becomes Superman - makes him flesh-and-blood and human while rendering utterly plausible his quasi-divinity - in a way unthinkable before or, for me, since.

It's very gratifying, therefore, to see that, at least in terms of looks, Bryan Singer is really sticking to the blueprint. The photos of the new Superman, Brandon Routh, are striking insofar as the effort made to make Routh look like Reeve. Check out these Clark Photos. Here's Reeve:

And now here's Routh:

Spooky, huh? And I just love how the clothes and the haircut are almost identical. Singer clearly isn't kidding when he says he's continuing the story from Superman II. I wish he were being as faithful with the main event:

Granted, Routh looks great, and I like the beveled edge on the shield. I'm not crazy about the darkening of the red to maroon (I'm hoping this is just a dark or improperly timed shot, but Singer is on record as saying the cape and trim are maroon, not red, despite the fact that anyone who's ever used a color wheel knows cyan wants red, not maroon, as a complement) and the smaller chest shield diminishes, in my mind, what should never be diminished.

Nonetheless, the overall effect is still super.

Oh, and if you're interested in seeing Singer, Routh, and the rest of the crew in action, Rastar shot some great amateur video on the set in Sydney a couple of weeks ago and has cut it together to the theme music. It's a terrific first look at the next chapter in my personal favorite mythology.

June 2006. Can't hardly wait.

(Fanboy geekout postscript: I'll be seeing The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy tonight, a movie I've only been awaiting for twenty years. Review to come...!)

Politics

The Crow Flies North

2005-04-29T11:40:00.000-07:00

The Blog-A-Thon continues: Laine of As The Crow Flies... has flown in and perched on the interviewee's couch, thence to be incisively analyzed by yours truly. So without further ado, here are your questions, Madame Crow:

HOTSPUR'S BLOG-A-THON QUESTIONS FOR LAINE

1. A movie is being made of your life, and, shockingly, you have veto power over every choice made in the production. (Hey, this is fantasy.) Who do you choose to play you, and why?

2. Recount your most vivid and memorable dream, and what you came away from it with (what you thought it meant, if you're into that, or just the response it provoked in you).

3. You are, as Sole U.S. Legislator of the Day, allowed to make one ironclad national law which can never be revoked without your consent. Describe that law and the reasoning behind it.

4. How has your experience of being a parent differed from what you expected before the fact?

5. Tell us one thing you've never told anyone before. Ever.

Earn This

2005-04-28T16:13:00.000-07:00

THIS JUST IN: The Associated Press, via the Washington Post, is reporting that the Pentagon has finally relented after over three years and released photos of flag-draped coffins containing the remains of United States military personnel being returned from Afghanistan and Iraq. Mighty Christian of 'em.

How nice to see that "Support Our Troops" is no longer just a bumper sticker to Dubya and Rummy. Now maybe we can see about getting those kids some armor. Or am I just being hopelessly naïve?

Politics

The Thrill of Victory, The Agony of Defeat

2005-04-28T14:41:00.000-07:00

Poor Dennis Hastert. He and the House Republicans have officially thrown in the towel on their attempt to defang the Ethics Committee after Democrats simply refused to meet if the committee wasn't going to have any power to do its job. I gotta tell you, Denny, Tom DeLay simply isn't worth the public approval hit you guys have been taking on this thing as you've circled the wagons; he's lower than the insects his company exterminates. Oh, but you already figured that out, didn't you? Hence the surrender.

I also have to hand it to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. Bush and his Congressional allies have been stymied at every major turn since the second term began in January. Social Security privatization? Sorry. Using the federal government to intervene in the Terri Schiavo case? Not so much. John Bolton as U.N. ambassador? Doesn't look good. And now this. (Yeah, they passed the Bankruptcy Bill, but with the financial lobby outweighing the consumer lobby by about a billion dollars to none, there was no realistic way anybody was going to stop that one.) Plus, the chances of Bill Frist actually pushing the little red button on the "nuclear option" are looking weaker than Condi Rice saying, "I think the title was something like 'Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside The United States.'"

So despite GOP control of the executive branch, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, and much of the federal judiciary, if you're scoring at home (or even if you're by yourself, bah-DUM-bump) the card now looks like this:

Democrats.....4
Republicans....1

With a Dem in scoring position and no outs. This is David-and-Goliath stuff, folks.

But then again, a few months ago the Boston Red Sox came back from an 0-3 deficit to beat the Yankees and win the World Series, didn't they? Must be something in the water...

Politics