Month: November 2003

Via Atrios, I see that a recent installment of the comic strip BC is being interpreted by some as being an anti-Islamic message.

Well, I’ve read the cartoon, and I’m sorry. I’m as tired of anti-Islamic rhetoric as the next good leftie, but I just don’t see it here. All I see is an outhouse joke. Not a very funny one, of course, but I get the humor here. The guy’s sitting in an outhouse, and he’s wondering if he’s imagining the smell. I get the joke. I figured the anti-Islamic message was simply that the outhouse has a crescent moon carved into the door, but that’s pretty much a stereotypical image of all old wooden outhouses, isn’t it? I swear I remember seeing such outhouses in old episodes of Little House on the Prairie.

But then I read the WaPo article, and there is some seriously convoluted reasoning here: the use of the word “Slam”, which the cartoonist insists is to merely convey that the guy has gone into the outhouse, is actually a coded message specifically identifying Islam. That seems a bit extravagant for a newspaper daily comic strip, and a bit out of character for a strip wherein one rarely finds subtlety. And some guy says that the “Slam” cannot refer to the closing of the outhouse door, since people don’t slam outhouse doors, they close them gently. They do? Really? I take it this fellow has never been to any outdoor event where the “facilities” consisted of a bank of Porta-Potties. Believe me, they do get slammed. In fact, the repeated whack of the slamming door is a key way of finding the facilities in the first place.

This kind of thing is just like all the people decoding George Lucas’s views on race through careful analysis of his depiction of an orange-skinned amphibian and the guy I once worked with who refused to smoke Marlboro’s because the design of the pack is clearly a coded message endorsing the Klan. (Something about how the red field forms a K-like shape, if memory serves.) So come on, folks — instead of combing the funny-pages for right-wing propaganda that probably isn’t there, let’s comb actual policies for bad stuff that is.

UPDATE: TBOGG posted on this as well, and his position is the opposite of mine. But I admire his ability to relate it back to an episode of Seinfeld. I’ve long believed that there is nothing in life that can’t be related to Seinfeld.

Share This Post

OK, I knew it was coming. I read about it in various spoiler forums months ago. But I was still pissed off at ER last night.

(spoilers and geeky complaining here)

Last season, I was getting happy with ER again. See, a few seasons back, the show allowed its cast to balloon to ridiculous levels — there were so many characters that the old favorites stopped getting as much time as an old viewer like myself would have preferred (and I’ve been with the show since the third episode of the first season), and the new characters didn’t get enough time to establish themselves beyond their first impressions. This was all finally worked out with a big exodus: Dr. Finch was conveniently written out when Eriq LaSalle decided to hang ’em up as Dr. Benton; Dr. Malucci was fired; Dr. Chen was sent packing for half a season; Anthony Edwards’s desire to leave the show gave the producers the excuse to kill off Dr. Greene (brain tumor). Last season, the cast was back to manageable levels, and the show’s dynamic was a lot better for it (with the exception of all the overwrought crap they kept shoveling on Abby, Maura Tierney’s character).

But then, this year the producers have allowed cast-bloat again. Dr. Lewis has some guy she married in Vegas, and divorced. Each year usually sees the addition of a new med student to fill the “clueless young doc” spot (originated by Carter back in Season One); this year it’s Neela, the Indian-American med-student (whose last name I can’t recall for the life of me, because no one calls her “Dr. Whatever” — it’s always “Neela”). But for some unknown reason she’s joined by three other med-students, one of whom — a useless clown named Morris — is thrashing about for no apparent reason. And a new nurse was just introduced a few weeks ago, who might as well have walked onto the set wearing a T-shirt with “Luka’s New Lover” printed on the front.

Now, a few years ago, the producers would have just shoehorned all of these characters into each episode for a minute here and thirty seconds there, and none of it would be very satisfying. The approach now, it seems, is to actually send characters away for long periods of time. Thus, we’ve had Carter in Africa, unseen, for seven or eight episodes now. Chen has been shipped off to China. Kerry Weaver now gets about two scenes per episode (Laura Innes, by the way, has a fine television directing career shaping up) in which she shows up, does some bit of administrative work, and then vanishes again. But still, the cast is bloated.

Which brings me to last night’s travesty: the killing off of a character (I think), a favorite character of mine, a character whose story arc has been bungled constantly, and whose death — if a death it actually was — completely sucked. Dr. Romano, the prickly soul whose flashes of warmth were almost always directed at Dr. Korday, and whose left arm was severed when he got too close to a helicopter’s rotors a year ago, was apparently crushed to death with a burning helicopter fell out of the sky literally onto his head.

This development was so mind-numbingly awful that I barely know where to begin writing about it.

Well, there’s the death itself. Was this supposed to be some bit of cosmic irony? The enormously arrogant and gifted surgeon, whose career was destroyed when he lost his arm and who never adjusted to his new handicap, gets killed by a falling helicopter? Well, maybe that kind of freak thing happens in real life…but the way the episode framed the event, with Romano first going up to the hospital’s helipad and not being able to step out of the elevator because of a flashback to losing his arm, and then going back downstairs and staggering out into the parking lot to get some air, and then looking up to see the burning helicopter dropping out of the sky toward him….I could just hear the show’s writers sitting around a table scratching their heads while a producer-dude circles behind them saying, “Come on, guys! We gotta make it more ironic! Have Frank goad Robert into going up to the helipad because Robert doesn’t want to look like a coward!”

More problematic is that it’s plainly obvious that the writers and producers just gave up on Dr. Romano. They didn’t know what the hell to do with him, they didn’t know how to write someone who loses the ability to do the thing by which they have defined themselves, and they completely forgot Romano’s humanity. What I always loved about Romano wasn’t his great put-downs (of which there were many), but that his warmth would show up in very unexpected ways sometimes. When Dr. Korday (and only Romano could call her “Lizzie”) was struggling with what to do when Mark Greene’s tumor returned, it was Romano who gave her the sounding board she needed and told her what she had to do:

KORDAY: Am I just supposed to sit by and watch him die?

ROMANO: (softly) Yes.

It was Romano who once came stampeding into the hospital with a critical patient — his beloved pet dog. It was Romano who struggled valiantly to save Lucy Knight’s life when she was stabbed, and his tantrum in the OR when she died. And it was Romano who was hopelessly in love with Dr. Korday. Sooner or later on ER, just about every doctor gets to be “the hero”, the person who brings a patient through a harrowing and near-death ailment or injury. Romano never got to do that, and I had started to think that maybe Romano’s act of heroism would be to save himself, over the long haul, after his disabling. I had hoped to see him learn to use that prosthetic arm and find his ability to practice medicine again. Instead, a promising character arc got cut off when it became clear that the writers didn’t know how to write it.

(And really, why has no one learned of his death yet? Are we holding out some hope that he turns up alive later on or something? The episode ends with a crane lifting the wreckage of the chopper, and I figured that’s when someone would notice the body, but they just faded to credits. During the last fifteen minutes, a few people wonder where Romano is, but that’s it.)

I don’t object to random, shocking and senseless events in stories, because they happen in life. But this event was neither random nor shocking. This was “Oh crap, we’ve painted ourselves into a corner, so let’s just kill him and call it a day.” This was like when LA Law had a character step into an elevator shaft where there was no elevator (and that show never recovered), and to a certain extent it was like Bobby-in-the-shower on Dallas (a development to which I’ve generally been willing to give a pass, since the season that followed it was a really strong one). And it robbed one of my longtime favorite shows of one of my longtime favorite characters. I’m going to have a hard time trusting the writers now, because even if they get a really good storyline going, I won’t have faith that they can end it satisfactorily. That’s a shame.

Share This Post

I’m trying to avoid getting overly excited about any particular Democratic presidential candidate, because quite frankly I’ll be voting for whoever the Democrats nominate (unless they somehow manage to nominate, say, Michael Moore, a guy whose style could turn me off JRR Tolkien if he started extolling Lord of the Rings). But I have to note that I found General Clark fairly impressive on Letterman last night.

And now, here comes my last dose of political anger before I go on hiatus (so if such stuff annoys you, just skip this post):

Matthew Yglesias points out that Lileks takes a breather today from navel-gazing and rambling on about Gnat to get all mad at an Iraqi blogger who is insufficiently grateful to the country that put the Saddam regime in power, did nothing when Saddam got really bad, and then finally invaded to depose the guy but did not (a) finish the job yet or (b) show any sign that they plan to fill the void with anything better. Well, whether or not that particular take is appropriate, I’m getting really tired of the ideas that the only way to demonstrate one’s “stones” is to pick up a gun, and the one that anger at the current President of the United States is equivalent to anger at the whole United States, or the soldiers, or whatever.

OK, that’s that. Back to babbling about the usual stuff.

UPDATE: Dan Drezner has some comments on the Lileks piece. He’s even more of the view that Lileks is full of bird poop than I am. Note to self: read Drezner’s blog for a while.

Share This Post

The Eternal Flame burning above the grave of President John F. Kennedy, Arlington National Cemetery.

Unless you live in a cave (or, say, North Dakota), you surely know that this Saturday marks the fortieth anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination. I’ve looked around the Net for some cool stuff to post about it, and there is a lot of good stuff out there. The best things I’ve seen are:

This virtual tour of Dealey Plaza;

This live cam from the Sniper’s Nest, from where Oswald fired on the President;

The official site of the Sixth Floor Museum, which is an amazing place. I was fortunate enough to visit the museum some years ago, as part of a “JFK assassination bus tour” when my wife and I had a business trip in Dallas. I also saw the house where Oswald’s infamous “backyard photos” were taken (the famous shot of him posing with his rifle), the theater where he was captured, and I made a point of standing where Zapruder stood. I have no informed opinion as to whether or not the assassination was a conspiracy, but I will note that Oliver Stone’s JFK is one of my favorite films.

Oh, and Scott of Archipelapogo actually works in that building. It’s an interesting and small world.

Share This Post

Via David Sucher I see one of the dumbest looking buildings ever designed. The idea is a stack of boxes, each one slightly offset, and with no windows. If they paint really big letters and numbers on each face, the thing would look like something my 4-year-old would make from blocks. I like nifty-looking buildings, but sometimes we have to step back and wonder if we really want our cityscapes to look like games of Jenga “in progress”.

One of David’s commenters wonders if the people who complain about no windows (and I definitely think that all those featureless facades look pretty dumb) would be OK with it if the builders painted or glued on fake windows. Probably not. In the town where I used to live, some old buildings were demolished in favor of a new CVS drugstore in the downtown section, one of those shoebox-shaped drug stores like Eckerd’s. Problem was, with that building design, the front door goes on the “short end” of the shoebox, but the lot did not extend back from the street enough to allow them to build that design such that the door would face the street, so they simply built it “the long way”, with the door on the “side” and the store’s featureless wall lining the street. The brilliant solution the company came up with was precisely to glue, nail and staple up fake windows and doors and awnings. The result was one of the dumbest looking buildings I’ve ever seen, and each time I drove by it I would think of that scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail when King Arthur and the boys are admiring Camelot from a distance, and the pack-mule guy mutters, “It’s only a model”.

David also makes the point, in another post, that wind farms are actually beautiful things. I agree. My wife’s grandmother lives in the midst of a very big windfarm in northwestern Iowa, and on our last visit I found them profoundly lovely — especially on one foggy morning when those slowly-turning turbines looked, from a distance, like some kind of giants on a lonely moor. Also, people who complain about the droning sound of a windfarm are just plain wrong. We actually went and stood underneath a turbine that was rotating at a pretty decent rate, and the drone was actually softer than that of the normal buzz of the autumn locusts.

Share This Post

According to Jesse Ezra at Pandagon, the FOX network is considering reviving the animated show The Family Guy. Apparently DVD sales of the show are brisk enough to make the FOX people think that there’s sufficient audience to keep the show around. For myself, I never found the show particularly funny, and I’ve been perplexed by the show’s large fandom. I did enjoy the episode where the megalomaniacal, British-accented toddler declares war on broccoli, but that’s about the only time the show ever really made me laugh. Go figure.

Share This Post

Film Score Monthly has a good review of the soon-to-be-released score CD to Return of the King today.

Also, Soundtrack.net has a good, long interview with Lord of the Rings composer Howard Shore. How does a newly composed symphony, involving six movements and based on themes from all three films, sound? Or a boxed set sometime next year, comprising hours upon hours of heretofore unreleased LOTR music? (Keep in mind that the score CDs are 70 minutes long, while the films are each in excess of three hours!)

And somewhere (but I can’t remember where, so I’ll see if I can find a link later) I read about a possible book about the LOTR music, which would be an outstanding thing for film music lovers. It’s a genre that doesn’t get nearly enough interest, scholarly or otherwise.

Share This Post

The other day I finally got to read Issue #36 of The Amazing Spiderman, which was the issue that centered on 9-11-01. I remember reading a lot of laudatory stuff about the issue at the time it came out, but reading it now, two years later, I don’t know — the sentiments expressed are fine, but they’re really the same sentiments expressed pretty much everywhere else anyone’s written about 9-11-01. And when some horrified bystanders demand of Spiderman, “How could you let this happen”, well — that just dragged in the Giant White Elephant into the story. How could anything like that happen in a world with superheroes? How could all those superheroes fail to stop such an act? The writer, J. Michael Straczynski, can only offer as an answer that “We couldn’t imagine this”, but really, that doesn’t cut it, does it? The same heroes who have literally saved the earth from destruction couldn’t thwart something like a pair of airplanes on a bright late summer morning?

Well, OK, even if I can totally buy the idea that the whole thing happened too fast, that the heroes’ attention was elsewhere at the time, why couldn’t they do anything to save all those people trapped in the higher floors? Some of those folks can fly, you know — couldn’t they catch the poor souls who decided to jump rather than burn or choke? Surely Storm of the X-Men could have used a localized icestorm to slow the fires as they burned? Surely the superheroes could have done something other than lift girders from the pile of wreckage. And even if I grant that they could do nothing to stop the planes, and even if I grant that they could do nothing to help until the Twin Towers had fallen, what then? Why didn’t they band up and take on Al Qaeda?

I probably sound snarky here, and a little like the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons. But there was just a terrible sense of falsity in this issue that deflated the whole enterprise for me as the reader. I know that such a catastrophic event poses problems to storytellers who are writing continuous stories set in real-world places, and I don’t know how it could have been dealt with best. But this issue just seemed…wrong somehow. False. As if the writers were trying to have the best of both worlds. I’m just not sure that a world with superheroes can even admit the kind of evil the real world witnessed on 9-11-01.

Share This Post

The finalists for the memorials at the World Trade Center site in NYC were unveiled today, and in all honesty, I’m with John Scalzi — none of them really strike me. But it’s really hard to get a handle on them; only one, “Reflecting Absence”, seems to convey what the memorial would look like in the context of the design for the office buildings they’re planning to erect on that spot, and one — the “Memorial Cloud” frankly looks to me just plain bizarre. And quite honestly, the written descriptions of the memorials are mostly painful to read, in the sense of “purple prose”. (Do the “Memorial Cloud” people really want the symbolism of a bandaid over a wound?)

Memorials are really tricky things.

Share This Post

I have a lot of work I’m catching up on (none of it for money, but hey, maybe it’s all leading somewhere bright and golden), which is why I’m late in posting today and why I’m inflating things with pictures. Go figure.

Anyway, don’t forget that after this Friday I’m taking a break from posting here until one week from Sunday.

Share This Post