I am now participating in a group-blog called Collaboratory, which was conceived by Sean Meade, the owner of Interact. This project is in its infancy, and we’re not even totally certain of our “mission” (if there even is one), but here’s hoping. Check it out. (As of this writing there are only a handful of posts and no front-page bells or whistles, though I’m sure those are to come.)

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I’ve added a section to the sidebar at left, called Notable Dispatches. Here I shall provide front-page links to past entries that I particularly like. Nominations are, of course, accepted.

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It’s interesting how the same idea will crop up in multiple places in creative circles, and roughly within the same timeframe. Consider 1993, when two films about Wyatt Earp came out, or a few years later when legendary distance runner Steve Prefontaine was the subject of not one but two biopics. I wrote last week about the television series Millennium, which involved a former FBI agent named Frank Black who used an almost-psychic gift to track down serial killers; the same year that Millennium debuted on FOX, another series showed up on NBC that was about an FBI agent named Samantha Waters who used an almost-psychic gift to track down serial killers. This show was Profiler, which lasted four seasons to Millennium‘s three.

All of these examples jumped to mind when I read this MSN article about a recent spate of novels centering on, of all things, the Jewish golem. I read one of these novels recently — Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay, which I reviewed here — and I am a bit surprised that the golem is suddenly such a popular item. (It was also the subject of an episode of The X-Files during that show’s fourth season.)

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Which brings us to the Bills uniform revision. When Tuesday Morning Quarterback saw the design he had a simple, primal reaction: to run from the room screaming, “aaaiiiiiiiiyyyyyyyyeeeeeeeeeeee!”

The new Buffalo garb looks so much like current New England attire that when the Bills play the Pats, Drew Bledsoe isn’t going to know which huddle to join. And the Bills have tossed out red as their accent color, replacing it with gray. Gray — now there’s a color that really pops. And the away jerseys are so fussy, they make Denver’s rollerball duds seem a clean design. But these are not the reasons for TMQ’s primal scream. The reason is that Buffalo had been using traditional American flag red-white-and-blue, and now abandons that combination. In other words, the Buffalo Bills thought they could improve on red, white and blue.

— Gregg Easterbrook, Tuesday Morning Quarterback, on the Bills’ new uniforms.

:: I have to say, I agree with TMQ on this one. I was fairly ambivalent about the Bills’ new duds when they were unveiled (well, actually I was ambivalent about the home uniform while I immediately disliked the new road uniform), but now that I’ve seen more of it….I don’t like the look. The Bills don’t look distinctive anymore; instead, they look like every other team that has hopped on the New Uniform Bandwagon in recent years. (The Bills’ new look is inspired by the Broncos and the Titans, apparently.)

Easterbrook’s AFC preview is up, with the NFC to come next week. If you haven’t read Easterbrook before, please do so. He is funny, engaging and literate. He also knows a hell of a lot about football.

(BTW, it seems that my middle-of-the-road view regarding the Doug Flutie vs. Rob Johnson fiasco was the correct one. While Bills fans were either jumping on the Johnson bandwagon or burning their Bills gear after the team had the audacity to send Flutie on his way, I was saying: “They both stink”. Guess what? Neither Johnson nor Flutie is starting this year.)

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Courtesy MSN: a good article about the development of a space elevator, which could be an excellent alternative to loading up the shuttle with a seven-person-crew each time we need to ferry something into space. (Although, after reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy, all I can say is: the security around the elevator had better be foolproof.)

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Voters for the Pro Football Hall of Fame are going to have a hard decision to make in five years, because that is when Terrell Davis will become eligible. His career, which officially (and sadly) ended yesterday, was a short one — but it was still stunningly productive: in seven seasons, he rushed for 7,607 yards and sixty touchdowns. Those are low numbers, and they may keep him out of the Hall of Fame — but as far as I am concerned, he belongs there. He is one of only four running backs in history to rush for 2000 yards in a single season, and more impressively he did it for a team that went on to win the Super Bowl (the 1998 Broncos). That may not seem like much, but it is often the case that the leading rusher in the NFL comes from a team that is only suited to the run; in fact, it wasn’t until 1993 that the team with the NFL’s leading rusher even made it to the Super Bowl (the Cowboys, who won the game). And the year before Davis’s 2000-yard season, he was merely the Super Bowl MVP when he put up 157 yards and three touchdowns against the Packers (a game in which he famously missed part of the second quarter due to a migraine headache). I’m not a Broncos fan, but Terrell Davis was a magnificent player who — like baseball’s Kirby Puckett — was, for a time, the heart-and-soul of a championship club (with all due respect to John Elway). He’ll be missed.

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I am no expert on H. P. Lovecraft, so I don’t know if he’d be amused by this. But this does now make me think of some interesting directions a possible Toy Story 3 could take.

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Two items of surpassing niftiness (it’s my blog, I can make up any word I want) appeared at AICN today. First is a trailer for the newly-restored version of the SF classic Metropolis, a film that established tropes which influenced many a filmmaker (not the least of which is George Lucas). It appears that just about every minute of previously-missing footage from Metropolis that can be found, has been found and that this new version is as close as we are ever going to get to the original version seen in 1927. While I won’t be able to see the new version until a DVD is issued (and I get a DVD player), it’s still exciting to note the wonderful treatment a cinematic SF classic has received. (Roger Ebert also wrote about this new Metropolis restoration last week. Ebert is a long-time champion of restoration of classic films, so many of which are in horrible shape due to neglect of the prints and negatives. I wish he’d become more musically aware, though, and bring his passion to bear on filmscore restoration.)

The other goodie on AICN today is also a film trailer, the first glance I’ve had of Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away. My God, I can’t wait for this film. If you, dear Reader, are one of those people who will only go see an animated film if it bears the “Disney” imprint, go see this one! (It’s being distributed by Disney, but that didn’t help Princess Mononoke two years ago.) Check out the trailer. It’s breathtaking, and that’s saying something for an image the size of a business-card on my monitor.

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The alternative comic strip Tom the Dancing Bug appears weekly in Artvoice, Buffalo’s alt-press paper. As a political commentary it’s generally not quite as good as This Modern World, but sometimes it’s very good. Case in point: this week’s parody of Spider-man, “The Amazing George W.”. I found this hilarious.

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I’m really not terribly excited about Star Trek Nemesis. Rick Berman and company did a lot of good things in their day, but I think the current regime in charge of Trek has pretty much run out of ideas. (I have not seen a single episode of Enterprise, so I can’t comment on that; it’s only on cable in Buffalo and we don’t have cable.) From what I’ve read of the Nemesis storyline, it seems like a rehash of a lot of earlier Trek stories (with a lot cribbed from The Wrath of Khan). I know that the story focuses on Data’s long-standing “quest” to become more human; my problem there is that sometimes quests are achieved without our knowing it. Data reached a point of “closure” in First Contact, and I really don’t think there’s any point in keeping it going. Likewise, I’m not all that interested in the ongoing tribulations of the Romulan Empire. I’d much rather see a Trek film that actually explores strange new worlds and seeks out new life and new civilizations. If this is to be the last voyage for the Next Generation crew, why not show them actually, well, boldly going where no one has gone before?

(The film was also to feature a brief cameo by Wil Wheaton as a grown-up Wesley Crusher; I suppose he finally wrapped up his Grand Tour of the Mysteries of the Universe with that “Traveler” guy. But, as reported on WWDN, the scene in question has been cut. So Wesley won’t save the day one last time; ah, well….)

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