Back in November, I pointed out a piece at Slate in which Jack Shafer wondered when we’d start seeing evidence of Xers in charge of the mainstream media. His panel of experts concluded that the first sign would be references to The Simpsons in headlines.
And here we go, from today’s Chicago Tribune:
I, for one, welcome our new Xer overlords.
A new feature here at Geek Philosophy: each week I’ll pick a geek who’s done something worthy of special recognition, something that highlights how increasingly important all things geeky are becoming to the world. The first Geek of the Week: NASA climate scientist Dr. James Hansen, who’s also an adjunct professor of Earth and environmental sciences at Columbia University.
In 1999, Dr. Hansen wrote this:
In my view, we are not doing as well as we could in the global warming debate. For one thing, we have failed to use the opportunity to help teach the public about how science research works. On the contrary, we often appear to the public to be advocates of fixed adversarial positions. Of course, we can try to blame this on the media and politicians, with their proclivities to focus on antagonistic extremes. But that doesn't really help.
Ever play Paranoia in your geeky high-school RPG-playin’ days? Did you have any idea then that you were actually training your brain then to deal with the bullshit it was going to have to accommodate 20 years later?
One of the panels I sat on -- moderated, actually -- at Arisia a couple weeks ago was “The Three-Minute Movie.” A quick-fire comedy panel, it went like this: audience members threw out the name of a beloved (or not so beloved) SF/F movie, and my fellow panelists -- Kristin Burger, Solomon Davidoff, Michael David McAfee, Robert Balder -- and I tried to sum up the film as quickly as possible. Some of the summaries went on for just about three minutes and were too much to capture as I sat there with my laptop: I’m not that good a typist, and they wouldn’t have translated to text, anyway. But here’s a few that survived the transition well:
The Matrix: What do you call a million robots at the bottom of the zeitgeist? Whoa.
Blade Runner: Robots are bad. Am I a robot? Robots are good.
Blade: Who’s the half-breed vampire who’s a sex machine? Blade!
Mad Max: Hello, my name is Mad Max. You killed my doggie. Prepare to die.
Fantastic Four: Not so much.
The 1986 The Fly: “Your arm’s off!” “No it isn’t.”
Sometimes one summary would inspire others, and we wouldn’t wait for audience suggestions but just let the stream-of-consciousness flow:
Friday the 13th: They’re killing us all! Let me take off my shirt! Let’s split up!
Night of the Living Dead: Zombies are after us! Let’s not run!
Tomb Raider: *run run run* Oh look, she’s wearing tiny shorts! *run run run*
The Dukes of Hazzard: *vroom vroom vroom* Oh look, she’s wearing tiny shorts! *vroom vroom vroom*
The Fast and the Furious: *vroom vroom vroom* Oh look, they’re all wearing tiny shorts! *vroom vroom vroom*
The best moment, however, may have been when someone in the crowd shouted out “Dune!” and all my other fellow panelists spontaneously broke out into an apparrently famous filk song. It’s sung to the tune of “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue,” and it starts out like this:
The spice melange, it's so cinnamon sweet,
I put it on most everything I eat.
It's addictive, too,
And don't it make my brown eyes blue.
The whole thing is here. It made me reconsider my aversion to filk -- clearly, I’ve been missing some good stuff.
Twenty years today since the space shuttle Challenger disaster. Is there another particular cloud formation -- aside from perhaps any given mushroom cloud -- that resonates so horribly as this one?
I’m hardly the first to note that this event is the single defining moment for Generation X: “The world stopped when the Challenger exploded,” says Bryant Adkins at In the 80s (though this appears in an essay that requests we not call him an Xer but a “child of the 80s” -- as if that would change anything that we all are). Everything2.com has a section called Where we you when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded? -- and while the anecdotes are all spectacularly banal (“I was out shoveling the driveway, and when I came back in, Mom tells me, ‘Something happened to the space shuttle’”), I find myself nodding and recognizing myself in them.
My story: I was a junior in high school, but for some reason school was closed for the day so I was home. I watched the launch and then either turned the TV off immediately after the blast-off or the network cut away before that fateful throttle up, and when I came back a little bit later to watch a movie (geez, and I remember this, too: it was a Marx Brothers movie I’d borrowed from the library), I learned what happened and was riveted to the tube for the rest of the day.
Cassie loves getting her tummy rubbed these days. She didn't used to -- I think she's getting sentimental in her old age...
In honor of the release of the new IMAX movie Roving Mars (read my review here), the people who helped make Mars what it is today: Orson Welles (recording his War of the Worlds radio program); Percival Lowell, who “discovered” the “canals” of the Red Planet; and Marvin, whose plans to blow up the Earth have surely taken on a new urgency since we started throwing cute robot rovers at his home.
It started when Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell threw a fit and decided to stop doing her job:
Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell has reportedly posted a comment on the Post's internal message board announcing that she has learned the following "lesson" from exchanges with Media Matters for America: "From now on, I don't reply." Howell's language did not make clear whether she meant that she would no longer reply to any criticism, or only to that registered by Media Matters.
[from MediaMatters for America]
Then, irate Post readers flooded the Post’s blog with critiques over another of Howell’s ombud columns. So the Post did what any civic-minded journalistic institution would do -- it stuck its fingers in its ears and said, “La la la, we can’t hear you!”:
I'm not the kind of person who names her plants, as much as I love them. I also don't talk to them. But if I were and if I did, this monstrous aloe vera plant would be Audrey II, and I would say extra special nice sweety things to it, because I suspect it's in cahoots with the scary-big out-of-control jade tree to overthrow my benevolent rule of the apartment.
How often can we watch weather clowns on the local news chuckle as the Barbie-and-Ken anchors ask, “So, Bob, is it global warming, or just wacky weather?” before we all go, “You know what? It’s global warming.” How much anecdotal evidence before it’s just, you know, evidence?
I knew hobbits were small, but this is ridiculous.
57 years of mystery: Who visits Poe's grave?
Roses and bottle of cognac appear on writer's birthday each yearBALTIMORE, Maryland (AP) -- For the 57th straight year, a mystery man paid tribute to Edgar Allan Poe by placing roses and a bottle of cognac on the writer's grave to mark his January 19 birthday. For the 57th straight year, a mystery man paid tribute to Edgar Allan Poe by placing roses and a bottle of cognac on the writer's grave to mark his January 19 birthday.
[from the AP via CNN]
TheHouseofUsher.net has a purported genuine -- and genuinely eerie -- photo of the graveside visitor... and links to one literary geek’s tale of journeying from Sweden to Baltimore to join the annual boneyard ritual to watch for the unknown mourner. It’s kinda like waiting for the Great Pumpkin, it seems...
The next writer who inspires such devotion is probably a blogger posting right now. What will be the virtual equivalent of leaving flowers and booze on a tombstone? Ritual hacking of a legacy Web site once a year to post an image of flowers and booze?
I'm finishing up the manuscript for my Princess Bride book -- it's a geeky deconstruction of the film; the book will be out later this year (I think) -- so these fellows are much on my mind...
In my persona of movie critic and professional geek, I make occasional guest appearances at science-fiction conventions, where I sit on panels about genre film and TV and generally have a ball. This past weekend, I spoke and partied at Arisia, in Boston. I was delightfully stunned by the reception I got there. When I introduced myself at panels -- which I do by saying something like, “I’m MaryAnn Johanson, I’m a film and TV critic, and I run FlickFilosopher.com” -- invariably people would say something like, “Wow, that’s you?” in a heartily approving tone. Boston-area print film critic Dan Kimmel’s annual Arisia roundup of geek movies released in 2005 was probably the best-attended film panel at the con -- I was but a mere audience member for this one, not a panelist; though Dan, whom I’ve come to know and worship and often disagree vehemently with over the past few years, assures me I will be on this panel next year. When I stood up to offer a comment, Dan insisted I introduce myself, and a wave of “ooohs” and “whoaaaas” rippled through the room. I was floored, and flattered. Perhaps eight-plus years of slaving away online are finally starting to pay off...
In mid February, I’ll be at Boskone, also in Boston. If you’re around, stop by and say hello. I am so much fun when I’m drunk, which is often at conventions...
Today marks the 300th anniversay of the birth of the man who may be the original American geek: Benjamin Franklin. Born on January 17, 1706, Franklin was “one of the most extraordinary human beings the world has ever known” -- says PBS in its subsite devoted to the man. The Franklin Institute Online likens him to such modern-day fictional inventors as Back to the Future’s Doc Brown and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids’ mad-scientist Dad... people we would unquestionably call geeky. Me, I think Franklin may be the 18th-century equivalent of Bill Gates: a man who made a fortune and a legacy for himself on business acumen, technological innovation, and maybe a soupcon of controversy.
Franklin wasn’t the equivalent of a Generation Xer of his day, like George Washington and John Adams and most of the other Founding Fathers, who were younger than him -- he was more like a Boomer. And yet, as Time magazine described Franklin in 2003:
Benjamin Franklin is the founding father who winks at us.... He was, during his 84-year life, America's best scientist, inventor, diplomat, writer and business strategist, and he was also one of its most practical, though not most profound, political thinkers.
Between the snarky sense of humor and the pragmatism, he sure sounds Xer-ish.
Check out the Wikipedia entry on Franklin, and the events the city of Philadelphia has planned for this anniversary year.
(That image up at the top of the post? It’s from The Alcohol Tarot.)
I’m loving that the Stargates have returned... Well, I’m loving that Stargate SG-1 is back, and that it continues its reinvigoration by getting more aggressively anti-religion: last week’s episode, with the whole “the gods cease to have power once you stop believing in them” theme, gave me a real atheistic tickle.
But Atlantis? Bah. One of my major issues with the show is how incredibly badly the Wraith suck -- pun intended -- as the Big Bad Guys. Vampires have been done to death -- or undeath -- whatever. This iteration of them simply isn’t scary, and it doesn’t help that I can’t look at them without thinking this:
For the uninitiated, that’s an Ogron, from Doctor Who, on the right in the second pairing. The Orgons were supposed to be funny. But I don’t imagine we’re meant to be laughing at the Wraith.
(Geek out over the Stargates at GateWorld.)
You might wonder whether it's all worthwhile, or if I am, in fact, going partially insane...
What's driving Mark Morford to the edge? Why, living the geek life, of course.
No one captures the aggitta of geekiness like Morford...
Bureaucracy and government obfuscation, of course, are already real:
Space tourists must be screened to ensure they are not terrorists, according to proposed regulations from the US Federal Aviation Administration.The draft report's suggestions aim to prevent a terrorist from destroying a spacecraft or using it as a weapon.
[from BBC News]
And it’s obviously past time for someone to start thinking about these things, because:
AN EXTRAORDINARY "hyperspace" engine that could make interstellar space travel a reality by flying into other dimensions is being investigated by the United States government.The hypothetical device, which has been outlined in principle but is based on a controversial theory about the fabric of the universe, could potentially allow a spacecraft to travel to Mars in three hours and journey to a star 11 light years away in just 80 days, according to a report in today's New Scientist magazine.
[from the Scotsman]
And we’re gonna wanna get our interstellar asses in gear, because gray-goo doom looms ever closer:
WASHINGTON (AP) -- From toothpaste to trousers, dozens of everyday products contain materials made through the blossoming science of nanotechnology -- but laws safeguarding the public's health and safety aren't developing nearly as quickly, according to a new report.Few will say whether the nano materials, often hundreds of times smaller than the diameter of a human hair, are unquestionably safe or dangerous given the lack of definitive research into the matter.
[from CNN]
Got your space suit?
That sunny spot on the couch is highy coveted in the late afternoon...
A good spot for grooming, Mrs. Kennedy thinks... to the extent that she thinks, that is.
Cassie demands her turn.
Sam is happy worshipping at the strange altar where the human sits most days, tapping on a machine. Good thing the sun gets there, too...
Today is International Skeptics Day, cuz, I guess, what better day than a Friday the 13th on which to call bullshit on superstition and nonsense?
To celebrate, a few of my favorite skeptical resources:
Talk.Origins Archive: good for finding material to battle your crazy cousin who thinks our planet was created on a Tuesday in October, 4004 BC.
Astronomical Pseudo-Science: A Skeptic's Resource List: for dealing with the crazy cousin who “knows” NASA never went to the moon 250,000 miles away but is convinced that aliens from 250,000 light-years away are dropping in for some relaxing cattle mutilation on a regular basis
Archaeological/Skeptical Resources: for the crazy cousin who thinks those cattle-mutilating aliens build the Egyptian pyramids (hey, I like Stargate, too, but c’mon)
Snopes.com: the first place I send well-meaning friends who believe Bill Gates is going to make them rich merely for forwarding emails
Internet Infidels News Wire: all the news that's fit to be blasphemous, or to enrage those who believe in the separation of church and state
Creation & Intelligent Design Watch: cuz half the people you meet have below-average IQs
If you still don’t have a date for International Skeptics Day, there’s always Skeptics Meetup.
And just because it’s fun (not because I believe in it): Geek Astrology.
But I do believe in SF writer Esther Friesner’s cheeblemancy, the ancient art of hamster reading. I’ve experienced the power of the hamster, and lemme tell ya, it’s downright eerie, that little rodent staring at you with its beady little eyes, seeing right into the depths of your very soul. *shudder*
One of these stories is honest-to-God real (culled from the Associated Press), and the other is honest-to-God fake (culled from The Onion). Can you guess which is which?
Activist Judge Cancels Christmas
WASHINGTON, DC -- In a sudden and unexpected blow to the Americans working to protect the holiday, liberal U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Stephen Reinhardt ruled the private celebration of Christmas unconstitutional Monday.
Judge: Baby on board is no excuse; Pregnant woman claimed she was driving for two
PHOENIX, Arizona -- Fetuses do not count as passengers when it comes to determining who may drive in the carpool lane, a judge has ruled.
And They wonder why we’re so cynical...
I can’t believe I haven’t been watching Countdown with Keith Olbermann all this time -- if a snarky, scathing political-newsy blog could be televised, this is probably what it would look like. I’m totally hooked... Olbermann is such a geek, and even if he is just a wee bit too old to be an Xer, he exudes Xer attitude. His show is full of pop-culture references, but not just any old random Simpsons quote to fill the time and get the kids interested -- he uses carefully chosen Simpsons quotes (as well as those from all sorts of other sources that only a gen-u-ine geek would use) to deliver a completely appropriate zinger when the idiocy of the world demands it. When he referenced the Kent Brockman line “I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords” the other night, my jaw actually dropped open, and how often does that really happen? It feels like my head is gonna explode when I think about the layers of meta twisting in on one another here: a newscaster on a major network commenting on corruption in media and government by alluding to a fake newscaster who attempts to curry favor with powers-that-be in a joke prompted by real-life corruption that itself comments on why sucking up to power rather than speaking truth to it is never gonna work out in your favor.
The guys who aren't afraid to tell you what they think... and one (or two) who aren't afraid to tell you what to think: Keith Olbermann, Howard Stern, Rush Limbaugh...
Jon Friedman at MarketWatch, in a three-part profile of Kurt Andersen, founder of Spy magazine, decries the prevalence of detached sarcasm and joins with Andersen, 51, whom he dubs “the reluctant Godfather of Snark,” in lamenting the sorry condition of the younger generation for which Spy was a major influence.
Andersen, rightfully, frets that many young journalists today take the easy way out when they try to be funny and hip. He cautions writers to avoid the trap of declaring, "I'm 26, and I look at everything, good or bad, snarkily."Or as Leslie Savan, author of "Slam Dunks and No-Brainers," put it, journalism has shifted "from dogged reporting to catty retorting."
It's a valid point. Plenty of Web writers, in particular, seem to think that entertainment passes for good journalism, that meanness alone has value. When rock and roll bands run out of ideas, they raise the volume on their music for effect. When bloggers run out of ideas or are too lazy or stupid to offer analysis, they simply resort to raising the snark level.
It's second-rate writing, but what the hey - it enables bloggers to delude themselves into feeling important or at least, self-important. And that's what matters to them.
“I like Monty Python.” That’s what director Lasse Halström said at a press event last month -- and then it clicked, and I was like, Okay, so that’s where his new film, Casanova, is springing from. Cuz “Halström” and “farce” aren’t two words that generally go together, and neither are “Halström” and “geek touchstone” (though as I listened to him speak, I was suddenly reminded of the profound affect his My Life as a Dog had on me as a geeky kid, the likening of adolescent angst to the tragedy of a doomed dog circling the Earth in a space capsule). But Casanova is sharply, satirically funny, less like the work of the Pythons itself -- though it does feature an Inquisition that nobody expects -- than like something else that was inspired by them: The Princess Bride.
I finally got to see Monty Python's Spamalot on Broadway last week -- hoorah! It feels like I've been tormented for aeons by the existence of this show and its exhorbitantly-
The show is a riot, the third funniest thing I've ever seen in the theater. (The first is Fool Moon; the second, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Abridged, which is -- I can't believe it -- available on DVD.) It's much more than merely a revue of good bits from the Flying Circus and various Python flicks -- it's its own creature, familiar bits woven into new bits and spiced with a lot of parodizing of Broadway conventions and clichés. It is, as you should expect from anything with the Python name on it, wickedly irreverent.
It's so irreverent, in fact, that I was suddenly struck by its popularity: How did a culty little TV show end up being the hottest ticket in town? And then it occured to me that the previous hottest ticket in town, The Producers, also sprang from a cultish little film. What's going on?
What's going on, of course, is that Generation X, with its snarky attitude and tendency to embrace all things weird and funky and geeky, is not only working to bring these strangenesses to us, the audience -- Spamalot's Hank Azaria is an Xer, born 1964, and certainly a geek icon for his work on The Simpsons alone; The Producers' Matthew Broderick is an Xer, born 1962, and certainly a geek icon for his performance in Ferris Bueller's Day Off alone -- but the audience itself is now heavily Xer and geeky and doesn't see anything particular outré in Trojan bunnies and stream-of-consciousness insults ("Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelt of elderberries!"), or in making fun of Holocaust-seriousness or theatrical excessiveness.
Maybe, if we're very good, their gods of geekitude will bring us Star Trek: The Musical next year...
How dumb can a creature be if she's still smart enough to get someone to feed her and keep her warm? That deer-in-the-headlights look? Purely an evolutionarily acquired trick to mislead...
Hoorah! Stargate: SG-1 and Stargate Atlantis return tomorrow night.
I can’t believe I haven’t come across this before: BBSpot has a regular geek feature called Top 11 lists, and they’re generally pretty funny. A few recent seasonal lists:
Top 11 Ways Geeks Were Naughty This Year (No. 4: “Used genius for evil, not good.”)
Top 11 New Year's Resolutions Geeks Will Make and Break in 2006 (No. 11: “I will not start playing any video game after 2 am.”)
Top 11 Ways a Geek Prepares for Winter (No. 1: “Dresses in layers of t-shirts to fight the cold.”)
Any resemblance to geeks living or dead is purly hilarious.
Weeks before The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe opened, I had the chance to chat with some of the cast and crew, and they were all understandably anxious about how the film was going to be received. “’I love those books -- don’t screw it up,’” producer Mark Johnson said was the typical reaction to the news he was making a film adaptation of the beloved book.
I think it’s safe to say now that not too many folks think he screwed it up. The film topped the holiday box office -- movies don’t do this kind of business unless audiences are returning to see a movie twice or three times or more, and it goes without saying that people don’t see movies they don’t like more than once. And more: Geeks, in my anecdotal experience and observation, go to the movies a lot, much more often than the average nongeeky moviegoer, who might see only four or five movies in the theater each year. But any movie that achieves Narnia’s box-office success has to be one of the four or five movies the nongeeks are seeing, too -- the numbers demand it, I think, because it’s the rare geek who will see a movie a dozen times, or not, at least, this particular film. Narnia is wonderful, but it ain’t Star Wars or The Matrix. (Then again, part of the hilarilous appeal of the Narnia white-boy rap “Lazy Sunday” that appeared on the mostly irrelevant Saturday Night Live recently may be that it does touch on how deeply we geeks are moved by the film.)
