In Which the President is Agreed with by this Blogger

I wholeheartedly approve of one thing and, to the best of my knowledge, only one thing in President Obama's budget: it would appear that he's going to give our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq enough money to do their jobs effectively.

I could go on the offensive about everything that's wrong with the budget (i.e. most of the rest of it), but a) that would be too easy, and b) that would diminish the fact that the man finally got something right. So I'll leave it at that.

...And Another Thing

Eoin Colfer is not Douglas Adams, and he knows it. Aside from an overdose of continuity references in a book that will forever stand apart from the first five books in the Hitchhiker's trilogy, he does an admirable job of carrying on the legacy of lunacy.

First and foremost, Zaphod finally returned. So Long and Thanks for All the Fish is my least favorite book in the series because Ford doesn't do anything important until the end and Zaphod's not in it at all. Colfer pulls a wacky stunt at the beginning, letting characters live out their lives in a virtual reality thing for a while before plopping them back into the real world. This handwaves away any inconsistencies between the way Colfer portrays characters and the way Adams did, but aside from Random's er, random interest in politics, he does a fairly decent job of getting them right, and Zaphod's no exception (Zaph wasn't in the VR world, but he wasn't in the last two books either). He's lost one of his heads - please tell me that's not a reference to That Bloody Movie - but other than that he's still crazy.

The plot is wonky and Adamsesque, very reminiscent of Mostly Harmless in that everything fits together very neatly at the end, only this time we get a happier ending. Wowbagger the not-entirely-Infinitely-Prolonged-anymore-once-the-story-ends plays a rather prominent part, and what goes on with Trillian seems kinda odd, but weirder stuff has happened in this series and God knows she and Arthur were never actually going to be an item. Arthur is clueless as ever, and I really must give Colfer credit for creating the best and loopiest Ford Prefect since the original (I wasn't particularly impressed with his portrayal in either the TV series or That Bloody Movie).

Now the big question: Would Douglas Adams approve? I think he would have enjoyed its madcap insanity, but it does lack his signature style. It is not, thankfully, Artemis Fowl in space (nothing against that series, but that having been all Colfer wrote before this, I worried a bit that silly acronyms and super-geniuses were going to suddenly pop up everywhere).

So as I said, Colfer doesn't try to imitate Adams precisely, which is probably for the best, and just gets on telling an Adamsesque story in his own words. Frankly this is the best possible outcome.

Personal Code of Storytelling

Ford Prefect had a moral code in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy's fifth and until very recently final book, Mostly Harmless. (Rant tomorrow on ...And Another Thing.) The code goes something like this.

1. Never pay for your own drinks.
2. Never be cruel to any animal except geese.
3. Never bite the hand that feeds you (gentle nibbling okay).

I have a code about fiction.

1. Perfect heroes are boring.

2. Flawed heroes cannot obtain perfectly happy endings.

3. Perfectly happy endings are boring.

4. I would rather have a Bolivian Army Ending than a Deus Ex Machina.

5. Villains must die at the end of their first appearance (Big Bads of TV and book series are exempt from this rule. Leaving a film villain or minor villain alive at the end is obvious sequel-milking and must stop at once. Besides, Luke could have gotten some serious pathos if he found out Vader was his father after he already killed him).

6. Villains may defect and fight for good, but they may not become capital-H Heroes.

7. "Destroy the enemy superweapon" is not an acceptable plot line. They'll just build a new one.

8. "Destroy the enemy's mysical power source" is only acceptable as a plot line if you are JRR Tolkein.

9. You are not JRR Tolkein. (Hello, Mrs. Rowling)

10. You are not Joss Whedon. Nor are you Quentin Tarantino. Therefore you cannot write brilliant dialogue. And you will not have a rabid and devout geek/slacker following who swear that you can do no wrong.

11. You are not George Lucas. This is a good thing. (See #2, 3, 5 and 7.)

12. Making the same movie again and marketing it as a sequel is wrong. (Looking at Lucas again.)

13. Making the same movie again and marketing it as something completely different is very wrong. (Hello, Mr. Cameron.)

14. A sequel, in the very rare event that one is allowed to be made, must actually advance the plot. (Hello, Mr. Bond.)

15. Homages are okay. A story full of homages to different things is okay. A story that is nothing but homages to one other story is fanfiction.

16. Anyone who charges for fanfiction must be put to death.

17. No-one who gets their start writing fanfiction may write for the official continuation of the story about which they wrote their fanfiction. (Naming no names, I'm sure at least one of the Nu Who writers is guilty of this.)

18. No-one who gets their start directing music videos may direct anything but Art movies. "Style over substance" is not a good thing in drama (Hello Zack Snyder, I'm sure we'll meet again).

19. No, you may not reboot a franchise. That's called "cashing in on someone else's idea." It's also called "making the fanboys suffer continuity attacks." Come up with an original idea. (The Dark Knight was awesome. I just wish it didn't have to rely so much on already-established characters.)

20. Picking up an abandoned franchise where it left off is more acceptable, if only because Doctor Who did it so well.

21. No film series may last longer than three films. This means we wouldn't have Star Trek VI, but it also means no Star Wars prequels. We would have Star Trek: First Contact because of rule #23.

22. No television show/novel series may last longer than five seasons/books.

23. Exception to rules 21 and 22: if it changes scope dramatically (i.e. new writers, directors, cast, or focus) every three films/five years/books, it may continue indefinitely.

24. Any character who kills scores of innocents (innocents here meaning a faceless crowd of characters who are not actively evil), even for the greater good, is not a Hero. (Alan Moore you are guilty as hell of this.)

25. Blowing up New York before 9/11 was funny (Independence Day). Blowing up New York after 9/11 (and displaying the World Trade Center prominently in the skyline) is wrong. (Hello Zack Snyder. And no, I don't care that Watchmen is set in 1985. You made the movie after 9/11.)

26. And if you do nuke an American city, the guy who does it sure as hell doesn't walk (Hello Snyder/Moore again).

27. And if you do include the line "I did it thirty-five minutes ago" in your story, set it up right! (Moore did it right, Snyder not by a long shot.)

28. Slow-motion fighting was clever in The Matrix. But there was a purpose to it (for the lunkheads: to show that we're not in normal reality. This is why we never saw bullet-time outside of the Matrix). Way to devalue it, every single action flick since.

29. Vampires are not (healthy) romantic interests.

30. Unresolved sexual tension is not an acceptable main plot. Especially for a sequel.

I'm forced to conclude that every director of my college's radio station is clueless, sadistic, or insane.

Why else would people who apply for classic rock programs be forced to play five new songs an hour? Don't people who want to run classic rock programs generally by nature hate new music? Why would they force classic rock snobs to play music they neither like, endorse, or believe in?

The (actual) answer has to do with those record labels. You know, the ones who have squeezed every last drop of life out of the music industry already. You may be familiar with the song "Sounds Like Every Other Song Made By The Other Cobain Wannabes," covers of which have remained at the top of the charts since 1994.* This I blame primarily on the record labels, and now I have an even better reason to do so. The labels send albums to radio stations across the country, expecting the DJs to play the songs. No airtime, no future albums free for the DJs. I see no problem with this, of course, because 99% the music produced in my lifetime has absolutely no redeeming value, and 99% of that remaining one percent was made by bands that had already established themselves prior to my birth.

*and when it's not a cover of SLEOSMBTOCW, it's a rap "song," the title of which is unprintable here.

Anyway, the record labels expect us to play these songs. Somewhere down the line every station manager ever decided to bend over and take it like the effeminate pansy your average new-music lover is. And as a result, bands on these labels have a sense of entitlement. "Our songs don't have to be good. They'll get airtime anyway. That's how this works." News flash, "Stairway to Heaven" was never a single. No DJ in history ever had to play that song. Zeppelin told the label "no, find something else to be a single, because we're not cutting this down."

It's high time somebody told a label "no, find some decent music to send us, because we're not playing this manufactured noise."

The Paradox of Omnipotence

Wouldn't it be cool to be omnipotent? You could make anybody fall in love with you. You could teleport all your enemies to the moon and then blow it up. You could do that awesome lightning thing that Palpatine does in Return of the Jedi (and Jedi only, because I have to assume the first thing you'd do as an omnipotent being is erase the prequels from existence).

You'd be so awesomely powerful you could create something that you yourself couldn't destroy!

...er wait what?

Well, could you or couldn't you? You'd have to be able to, right, because otherwise you wouldn't actually be omnipotent. But then, once you did, there would be something that you can't destroy, so you wouldn't be omnipotent anyway.

A logical ubergod would be asking right about now, "why the hells I just created would I want to create something I can't destroy," and the answer is shut up that's not part of the question.

You might, for example, want to create a gigantic meteor to wipe out all life on earth and you don't want to be bothered by a last-minute conscience attack, so you make the meteor indestructable. So why not just blow up the planet?

Maybe you decide to unleash a Terminator on the planet, one you want to be unable to destroy because, again, last-minute conscience attacks have wrecked many an awesome sadistic plan. You could teleport it somewhere else if you had a conscience attack, so you'll have to make it so that you can't effect it at all. But then you could create a new Earth, teleport all the survivors to it, and send the old one hurtling into the sun with the Terminator still on board.

The question you actually need to ask is "can an omnipotent being cease to be omnipotent," and the answer is obviously yes, they can do anything, and once they've ceased being omnipotent they're no longer omnipotent so there's no paradox.

In conclusion, Mackie was an idiot.

State of the Ego

First off, blah blah excuse for not posting this week after two weeks of semiregular posts. Hey, I'm still way, way ahead of my December record.

Anywho, my fellow Americans, the state of the Union is pretty bad. But there's good news: I am awesome. It is you who have failed. For example, the stimulus that lined my cronies' pockets? I've appointed a special investigation to prove that that was your fault. Likewise the Ft. Hood shooting, the attempted Detroit bombing - those are your fault too. They have to be. Let me be clear: I am just too awesome to be responsible. And that earthquake in Haiti, a country bent over backwards by just the sort of government I'd like to apply here, well, that was a great tragedy and a chance for me to one-up my predecessor.

Hey, speaking of him, I've more than doubled the deficit since taking office, but that's still his fault, too.

See, nothing can be my fault, because I am awesome. For example, I'm so awesome that I'm going to antagonize Justice Kennedy and reveal my complete lack of understanding about how the Supreme Court can be overruled all in one breath. I was supposedly a constitutional scholar at one point, but I also supposedly spent time in the twilight of my predecessor's term gearing up to "hit the ground running," and that's simply not true. I just needed time to... er... uh, would... (fix that teleprompter please)... thank you. Let me be clear. The Presidency has a steep learning curve. Never mind all that "hit the ground running" stuff, there was still stuff I didn't know. Bush's fault. His vice-president is attacking every decision I make and that's just mean.

For example, in the past year I've decided to try a war criminal in a civilian court more or less next door to the scene of his greatest atrocity. A little while later we decided to begin installing full-body scanners in more airports. Let me be clear: we believe firmly that every foreign terrorist deserves full Constitutional protection, but lawful US citizens don't have a right to privacy. I'm sure the Supreme Court can stretch the right to privacy to allow both abortions and fully-body scanners, though. They owe me.

Let's see, next year. Despite voters in Massachusetts sending us a clear message, we're doubling down on the most liberal agenda in history, and that's change you can believe in. We're going to make health care more expensive for everyone except the 18% of you who don't have it. We're going to pass another stimulus to create or save another kazillion jobs and drown our grandchildren's grandchildren in economic servitude to China, all while unemployment continues to climb. We're going to antagonize our military some more both by tying their hands even tighter behind their backs and by trying to repeal "don't ask don't tell." All of this will make us less safe, healthy and financially stable, but it just might make the whole world love me, so it's worth it.

And that's what it's really about. That and my golf game.

Now let me be clear. It's going to be difficult to achieve this goal. Lots of you are probably going to be miserable. But I'm reaching out to Republicans in the Senate - which I have to do thanks to you selfish hypocrites in Massachusetts - to get "bipartisan" support for unpopular legislation. I'm calling on Republicans to spend more time in the political wilderness to get my socialist utopia started. Please ignore that it's working well for you as a political strategy, opposing every unpopular move I make, or to put it another way, opposing every move I make. This is about making me look good, and I need you to do that. Just as I needed the support of the communist party in Illinois when I ran for that state's senator.

In order to bring about change, I flew off to Copenhagen to try to get other people to agree to take more of our money in exchange for "carbon credits" or some such. Unfortunately, the rest of the world failed. But not me. Second place isn't good enough for me. I want to be especially clear on this: there was no incident last year that seriously damaged the credibility of the scientific community. Anthropogenic Global Warming exists, and it is happening. Anyone who says otherwise has the credibility of a 9/11 truther. And let me be clear: even 9/11 truthers are too nutty for a job in my administration.

In conclusion let me talk about Afghanistan and Iraq. We'll be out of there soon enough. I'm not saying we'll lose, because we'll just leave. You can trust me.

I'm too important to fail.

Taking a break from those political rants, but getting in a few jabs at the end for kicks

Me no likey ze presidente. Wah. Moving on.

I'd like to instead talk about the incompetence of the Secretary of...
no, just kidding.

I could entertain you by complaining about a cut on my tongue, but in order to do that I'd have to mistake "entertain" for "bore/disgust." I could tell you how I spent the morning adjusting the bridge of my guitar to try to fix the intonation, but that would only appeal to any guitar nuts out there.

So instead I'd like to talk about junk, because I think it declared war on me a while back. I'd clean my room every once in a while (under extreme duress, mind you), only for the place to be a mess again a few days later. It'd start out with just one or two toys not put away, and then there would be candy wrappers and old quizzes and water bottles and stuff. I mean, all I do is live there.

I'd also like to talk about how it is now 2010, The Year We Make Contact. But not First Contact and not plain old Contact either. Point is, it's the future, and I want to know where is the jetpack that's going to fly me to my floating office? Where are the cars that go 300 miles an hour and the airways that they can travel on? Where is the new class of slave labor, the robot? When are the robots going to show up and clear away all that junk in my room? When are the robots going to start winning American Idol because they can actually sing? When are the robots going to declare humanity an infection and purge them from the planet? (Don't worry; I've got plans to escape to Mars. Or just call Harrison Ford, assuming he's not a robot too.)

Where is that cool little device I can attach to my rearview mirror so whenever someone behind me shines his headlights directly into my eyes, the mirror tilts and reflects the light back into his eyes instead? That's what I really want to know. That's a device I want to use.

Where's the mute button for children? The one that makes the whining brats in church shut up when their parents are too lazy to spank them or take them to a crying room?

Where's my ray gun? As far as I'm concerned, we're not in the 21st century if I can't melt a hole in the wall with something I can fit in a large pocket. (PS: 20th Century Fox has been out of date for ten years now.)

Come on, people, you fumbled the ball for the first decade, and given the terrorism and the president who had a hard time pronouncing words with more than two syllables (and his frankly even more moronic opponents) you can be forgiven for failing this badly at bringing us into the future. I want my robot slaves, I want my jetpack, I want my flying car, I want my mirror-reflecto-thingy, I want my baby-muter, and I want my ray gun. And that's change I'll believe in.

What the rest of 2010 looks like

The House isn't going to swallow the current version of the Senate bill. Period. The House barely passed a bill with Stupak's antiabortion amendment in it, and the Senate doesn't have that stipulation. So it's going to be back to the drawing board, and Scott Brown (R-Ma; I can't believe I just typed that) is going to help make sure no further Senate bills pass. Which means the current bill is all they've got, and the House won't take it.

Anybody who says the Democrats won't try reconciliation is crazy. It's their only option. It's the only thing they can do to pass anything on Obama's agenda, and it's the only thing they can do to put us on a very slippery slope towards Eurosocialism, which is something that most of America doesn't actually want.

So, yeah, watch that get ugly as hell.

Meanwhile, this is a massive repudiation of Obama, and anyone who says otherwise is still choking on Kool-aid. The man went to campaign for a Democrat in an ultraliberal state, and that Democrat lost. It's a fact that the only thing Obama can actually do is read a teleprompter. Govern? Ha. Respond to terror attacks at Ft. Hood and Detroit? Let me just check the stopwatch. If Bush had delayed that long, the media would have torn him to shreds.

Barack Obama: Incoherent without at teleprompter and a bore with it.

Most of the country is well aware of the disastrous mistake they made in November 08, and it shows.

On Dreams

So sue me, no update yesterday. It was Sunday, a day that we've set aside for rest in honor of the fact that the God an increasing number of Americans don't believe in rested on that day. Granted, He'd just gone and created the Universe. What did you do last week?

I really wasn't planning on doing an update today either because today's the day we celebrate Martin Luther King's dream of nailing 95 thesis papers into the content of our characters, or something.

But as it happens, I too have a dream. I have a dream that people will wake up and realize the following things in no particular order: that global warming is a welfare hoax designed to send our money to third-world tinpot dictatorships who hate us, that 99.9999999999999999 ad infinitum % of all music produced in the last 20 years has the same quality and taste as the lining of a pig trough, that Phantom Menace was worse than Attack of the Clones, that people who dress entirely in black had better be in a famous rock band or people will think they're pretentious, that walking three abreast at one mile an hour on a sidewalk wide enough for three people surrounded by a foot of snow on both sides is grounds for being stepped on, and that no matter what white guilt or post-racial sentimentality says, we must never again judge a presidential candidate on the color of his skin instead of the highly questionable content of his character.

Further End of Time ranting

When you take the toys out of the box, you have to do it in a way that ensures that putting it back together consists of more than "and now I wave my magic wand." The Time Lords and the Master cancelling out each others' plots could have worked so much better if it had taken less than thirty seconds.

In fact, arguably, in a two-part story, the plot of the first episode should be "Everything goes to Hell," and the second part should be "slowly struggle to put everything back together." But that's never what we get with RTD except, arguably, and with excruciatingly delicious irony, in the much-despised Season 28 (Series 2). The setup there actually gets the sacrifice it deserves. Okay, in Season 27, the Doctor sacrifices himself to save Rose after Rose saves the day. But hey, in a regeneration story, you're allowed to have the Doctor go out on a heroic sacrifice to save the world - but that's not what happens! The radiation chamber has absolutely no purpose except to kill the Doctor at the end.

"Each time the Doctor says he's not going to use a gun, I get a vision of a multicolored suit blasting the cyber-controller!"
-DWO Whocast

They also mentioned Tennant's big fall and compared it to Tom Baker's in Logopolis.

And Tennant, like his hero Peter Davison, goes out saving exactly one life (and then revisits past companions). Clever.

Also, Wilf gets himself locked in things too often (cf "The Sontaran Strategem"). You'd think he'd learn.

Matt Smith. Hoo, boy. He's tall, thin, young, got manic hair and an attitude to match... please please please tell me there's going to be some obvious character trait to distinguish him from David Tennant. That last scene with him looked promising, but it also looked like he was playing the post-death 10th Doctor rather than the 11th Doctor. Then again, Tennant pretty much did the same thing in his first appearance.

Does anything get better with age?

George Lucas sure as hell didn't. I'll take the Terminator and Aliens James Cameron over the Avatar one any day of the week. Independents preferred the 08 Obama to the 09 model. The Matrix sequels... wait, what sequels?

Doctor Who actually did get better for a while, or at least didn't get obviously worse until the 80s when JNT took over. Good for it, but Doctor Who, unlike anything I've already listed, is a thing that thrives on change. Nobody knew it when they started it, but this was a show that, in retrospect, seems to have been meant to rotate out its entire production team and cast every 3-4 years.

Look at every band ever. They start small, their songwriting skills get better, they release their masterpiece, and then they sell out and suck.

Just sayin'.