June 2006 Archives

So you’ve heard, of course, that J.K. Rowling is hinting that she may kill off her young hero in the final Harry Potter book, right?

“I wrote the final chapter in something like 1990, so I’ve known exactly how the series is going to end,” she told a chat show on Channel 4 television.

“The final chapter is hidden away although it’s now changed very slightly. One character got a reprieve. But I have to say two die that I didn’t intend to die,” Rowling said.

“A price has to be paid, we are dealing with pure evil here. They don’t target extras, do they? They go for the main characters -- well, I do.”

Asked whether one of the casualties would be Potter himself, Rowling said she had never been tempted to kill off the magician before the finale.

At the same time, she added: “I can completely understand, however, the mentality of an author who thinks, ‘Well I’m gonna kill them off because that means there can be no non-author written sequels. So it will end with me and after I’m dead and gone they won’t be able to bring back the character’.”

[from Breitbart.com]

A reader of mine, Roy, emailed me this evening to ask about my theories on this. This is what I told him:

Item: My hair is driving me crazy. It’s way too long, way longer than it was when that photo over on the right was taken back in November 2005. I’m half tempted to have it all shaved off. The other half is tempted to get some wild punky haircut. (I’m edging toward the wild and punky, sorta a modern shag with lots of chunky layers.)

Item: I recently bought the coolest new pair of PF Flyers sneakers. I know I really could use a pair of actual, grownup shoes, but whenever I go into a shoe store, I’m just drawn to all the way-neat sneakers on display.

Item: Just this afternoon I walked down to the post office and the grocery store in my pajamas. Not in a bathrobe (though I bet someone geeky enough and cool enough could pull off an Arthur Dent look) but in my wacky pajama pants and a T-shirt. You know, like all the kids are wearing. (Turning pajamas into streetwear is the only good thing Millennial kids have given us so far.)

New York magazine has a word for people like me -- people like a huge swath of Generation X: grups. Like from Star Trek. Which is a pretty geeky thing to do, dub a social trend after something Kirk and Spock and Bones argued about. Even if it doesn’t quite fit, since the grups were the dead grownups, not the old kids with the slowed-down aging process who took forever to grow up. But whatever.

Good news, everyone!:

Today, Comedy Central announced that Matt Groening’s other cartoon, ‘Futurama’ will return to television in 2008 with a minimum of 13 new episodes.

I’ve been deeply missing Futurama, and can’t wait for some new episodes.

And the bad news? JumpTheShark.com has jumped the shark: one of the coolest and geekiest TV sites is now owned by TV Guide’s parent corp, Gemstar. Oh, the inanity:

As part of the Gemstar deal, Jon Hein, founder of Jump the Shark Inc., will show up on TVGuide.com, TV Guide magazine and the TV Guide Channel.

"We believe Jump the Shark will be a valuable addition to our repertoire of entertainment content," Gemstar-TV Guide Senior VP Sanjay Reddy said in a statement. Hein did him one better with: "Gemstar-TV Guide was a natural fit for Jump the Shark and I'm excited to expand and enhance the brand with the leader on all things television."

I hope Hein got a good price for his soul.

(Technorati tags: Futurama, Jump the Shark)

(Technorati tags: catblogging, cat)

Second night of summer, and it’s still 88 degress at 11pm. Damn. In honor of too-sticky summer nights, here’s Buster Poindexter (aka David Johanson, no relation), who is hot, hot, hot, or so I’ve heard; Billy Idol, who was hot in the city, hot in the city tonight; and the Heat Miser, who is, I’ve heard tell, Mr. 101.

(Technorati tags: geek, dork, nerd, Buster Poindexter, Billy Idol, Heat Miser)

In the comments following my recent post “how the tide shifts: the generational cycle at work before our very eyes”, there’s been some discussion of the presidential power of each generational type and of a recent Joe Klein essay in Time magazine about how Barack Obama isn’t not running for the White House in 2008. It’s subtitled “Since baby boomers haven't proved very adept at running the show, it may be time for a new generation of leadership” and it starts out like this:

It was the sort of week that drives serious politicians crazy. Both Al Gore and Hillary Clinton had important things to say about global warming and energy independence—and the chatterati spent most of their time ignoring the messages and gossiping about the messengers. The debut of Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth, served as the excuse for a typhoon of speculation about whether he was running for President in 2008. Senator Clinton's sturdy bran muffin of a speech about the environment—it read like a term paper but was filled with smart detail and inconvenient truthfulness—was almost totally ignored because the New York Times decided to print a front-page story revealing the shocking fact that she and Bill were...still married and a lot of people remain perplexed by their relationship.

• The American Southwest is on fire.

• Mister Softee theme echoing through neighborhood.

• Wrist rests on the iBook suddenly feel really hot.

• First chance to take the iBook to Bryant Park and use the free wifi.

• Lazy cats lying where they can catch a breeze from the ceiling fan.

• Gotta carry the umbrella every day -- never know when one of those late-afternoon thunderstorms will pop up.

• I saw the first lightning bugs of the season last night!

The lightning bugs are pretty much when I feel like summer has arrived... they make me think of warm carefree evenings when you could stay up late because there was no school the next day and wouldn’t be for months. When it either wasn’t actually as hot as it gets today or it just felt that way because you were a little kid and getting all sweaty just wasn’t as uncomfortable as it is when you’re a grownup.

And I saw the first fireflies on the solstice this year, which is kinda cool. I’m not a Wiccan, but the cloest I get to any kind of religious observance is acknowledging the change of seasons, and I’d have loved to be at Stonehenge last year -- as yesterday’s Astronomy Picture of the Day depicted -- when it was open to the public and a group gathered to watch the sun rise over the stones on the solstice.

This is how it works. No one may be actually literally thinking, Damn, we really screwed up with those Xer kids, better get this new batch right. Because the “we” is us. It’s Xers having the babies now and looking back, maybe, at our own childhoods and the societal crap we’ve dealt with throughout out lives and saying, You know what? No kid of mine is gonna have to put up with that kind of shit. And probably no one is thinking that in a literal and absolute way, either -- it’s just how stuff starts to feel, as we look around at the world and see the mess that has resulted from everything that’s been going on for the last 30 years or so.

That kind of feeling started to build slowly in the 80s, of course, as the oldest Xers were entering late adolescence/early adulthood and were horrifying their elders with their extreme sports and their cynical attitudes -- that was when older generations took stock of Xers and started to wonder if baby-rearing couldn’t be done differently, and better, than they’d done with us. That was when we started seeing “Baby on Board” signs on cars, for instance, replacing, say, the “devil baby” movies of a decade earlier.

If that was the beginning of the pendulum swing, then the pendulum is reaching the far side of the swing now. It’s as if our entire culture is crying out as one, “Think of the children!”

Examples:

The price of gas has been remarkable stable in my little corner of the world this week: it’s exactly the same as it was when I posted this image almost a week ago. But that doesn’t mean I haven’t been spending the week scared shitless. Well, not really... but kinda.

• A New York Times article dissected at Daily Kos suggests that avian flu is quickly mutating into a form easily transmissable by humans...

• Also at Kos, blogger redstar looks at recent economic news that suggests that a significant economic slowdown is beginning:

At this juncture, there are really only two likely scenarios - one bad, one very bad.

The bad one is a recession, perhaps a deep one. Official inflows into USD are a leading indicator of this, in fact, the stagflation of the '70's and the recessions in the '80's were both preceded by this very thing.

The very bad one is the financial crisis the Volcker warns of which, if like the crisis precipitated by Nixon taking the US off the gold standard, may be tolerable, but all the same painful. Of course, back in Nixon's day, US exposure to foreign holdings of US assets wasn't quite what it is today, and even then, development of the Eurodollar market almost caused the US to lose control of its currency, something it is about to lose in the near future. ...

Either way, count on the job market to tighten, wages of average workers to languish even further, and inflation, especially at Wlamart and Target, to take a bigger and bigger bite out of your take-home, pre-heating bill pay.

It’s bad enough that I feel like people see me as Patty and/or Selma half the time anyway, and that they turned my passion for MacGyver into something dirty, but then they have to go and have Richard Dean Anderson on as a guest voice, as an object of lust for Patty and Selma, and in the process making me fall even more madly in love with RDA. Damn them, anyway, those Simpsons producers. Damn them.

See, what happened was I accidentally stumbled across, this past Sunday evening, a rerun of this season’s Simpsons episode “Kiss Kiss, Bang Bangalore,” in which -- among many other unlikely events -- Patty and Selma kidnap RDA from a Stargate convention and tie him up in their apartment. And don’t think I haven’t had that fantasy. But the salient point is: in the course of this episode, I discovered that RDA is even cooler than I had previously imagined. Not only is Mac like the neatest science dork ever -- even if he has that mark against him for being so embarrassed to be named Angus that he never told anyone his name... Not only was his neo-Western series Legend totally geeky and as much about goofing around with new technology as it was about making fun of pop culture... Not only is (I suspect) RDA an agnostic or at least an atheist, based upon some of the content of Stargate SG-1, of which he is not only a star but also a producer, meaning he’s influencing said content... But now, thanks to The Simpsons, I discover that he really has a fantastic sense of humor about himself. Because not only did he appear on the show in a story that completely makes fun of him as an actor, but he also does a funny voice that makes fun of him as an actor. He doesn’t even sound like himself -- I was convinced it wasn’t, in fact, him. But it was. And unless you’re a geeky girl, I’m not sure I can make you adequately appreciate how very, very attractive this is, that a guy who looks like this:

In this clusterfuck world in which we live, is there anything more apropos than Laurel and Hardy? Could you make this up, this pic, on the far left, of White House press secretary Tony Snow (left) and White House counselor Dan Bartlett (right) peeing their pants on the way to Baghdad earlier this week? It’d be funny if it wasn’t so pathetic.

(Technorati tags: geek, dork, nerd, Tony Snow, Dan Bartlett

I so don’t want to turn Geek Philosophy into the Global Warming Blog, but it could be rather interesting to devote at least some space to trying to guess what the coming crisis might be... the coming crisis as predicted by William Strauss and Neil Howe in their books about a generational theory of history, Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069; The Fourth Turning; and Millennials Rising: The Next Great Generation. (Just to be clear, for those who haven’t read their work, they don’t suggest that horrifying shit isn’t happening all the time, just that the particular personalities of the four generational types they posit, as well as at what stage of their lives each generation is at, at the time particular bad shit happens greatly determines how society reacts to the shit, whether it just shrugs and absorbs it and moves on, or whether it freaks out and goes crazy. As you may suspect, we are, if Strauss and Howe are to be believed, and I suspect they are, at the latter stage of the cycle.)

This crisis, according to Strauss and Howe, will be on a par with the American Revolution, the Civil War, and the Great Depression/World War II in its dramatic impact upon society, in its level of threat to our society as a whole, and in how its resolution will shape the entire next generational cycle, say, the next 75 or 80 years of so. Global warming certainly is looking like an excellent candidate -- see my long essay on Al Gore from a few days ago for some evidence of how people are sensing the urgency and import of that issue -- and with that in mind, I’m creating a new category for postings here -- “coming crisis” -- and starting my “neighborhood BP gas price watch.”

So glad to hear that my new habit of quaffing iced coffees is balancing out my overindulgence of wine:

Drinking as little as one cup of coffee a day could help protect you from liver disease caused by alcohol, according to research published today.

People who drink one cup of coffee are 20% less likely to have alcoholic cirrhosis than those who abstain from doing so.

Now all the egghead scientists need to do is reveal that sitting in front of a computer all day makes you more attractive to the opposite sex, and I'm all set.

(Technorati tags: coffee, alcohol)

A moment of silence, please, for Nemo, my feline nephew, beloved cat of my friend Bonnie, who passed away suddenly and unexpectedly this week. As cats are wont to do when they are ill, he hid all sign of his heart failure until it was far too late to do anything about it. He was pretty much the best cat ever, and will be greatly missed. He is survived by his miserable sister, Nuala, who’s too mean to ever die.

I was so galvanized by the new documentary An Inconvenient Truth (my review is here) that I felt compelled to, a few days later, snatch up one of the last tickets available to Al Gore’s town hall-style discussion at New York’s Town Hall (the theater in Times Square, not the seat of local government). That was on May 25th, and since then, I’ve been watching how astonishingly well the film has been doing in limited release -- at the moment its per-screen average is better than The Break-Up’s and second only to the surprising smash hit, for an unusual midweek release, of The Omen; one commenter at Atrios’s blog recently complained that, where he lives, he could see the idiotic “comedy” RV in an almost empty theater but there was no sign of Truth in his area yet, which is truly bizarre from a pure business perspective if nothing else. And I’ve been letting the experience of seeing the film and seeing Gore in person sink in, and I find myself feeling optimistic, maybe, for the first time in a long time, optimistic about the direction our society may be going in. And I’m itching to do something about pushing us in that direction. I can’t recall ever feeling like this before. And could be it’s symptomatic of a grand shift in Generation X from complacency and apathy to caring and action.

Hoorah! The forces of bigotry, small-mindedness, and unfreedom were defeated this week when the U.S. Senate failed to muster the 67 votes needed to get rolling a Constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. While we await the forced gay-marriages we will all be subject to, as the crazy-ass anti-gay wingers seem certain is coming to pass without this ban, herewith some famous gays:

Oscar Wilde, Elton John, and Jeff Gannon...

And some famous lesbians:

Ellen Degeneres, Emily Dickenson, and Mary Cheney...

(Technorati tags: geek, dork, nerd, Oscar Wilde, Elton John, Jeff Gannon, Ellen Degeneres, Emily Dickenson, Mary Cheney)

How’s your 666 day going? I’ve just been working all day, no sign of the Devil at all, unless you count the hours I spent writing up my review the new remake of The Omen, which I think is a hoot, and not just because my boy Liev Schreiber is in it. But how weird is it that Liev will be starring in, ahem, the curse’d Scottish play, the one you’re not supposed to mention by name inside a theater but which many theater folk -- of which I am one, having been a willing community-theater slave for many years -- will not name at all, anywhere, even if we’re not generally superstitious? (It’s just tradition, you know, to call it “the Scottish play.”) Anyway, after seeing Liev in Henry V in Central Park a couple years ago and having my devotion to him thus cemented, his brilliance and geeky Xer adorableness being at that instance so obvious, I plan on getting on line veeeery early one morning soon for free Shakespeare in the Park tickets. I hope he appreciates it.

My June essay is up over at The Internet Review of Science Fiction -- this month I discuss how the blockbuster killed the Hollywood science fiction film.

There was no May issue of the IROSF, by the way, in case you were wondering...

Free registration is required to read the content at IROSF.

You know what my fantasy is? Well, I do have this one fantasy about Josh Lucas and a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Phish Food, but I’m not gonna tell you about that one. No, the other fantasy involves me doing nothing but writing, all the time. Movie reviews, geek musings, screenplays, fiction... In my fantasy, FlickFilosopher and Geek Philosophy are updated like 12 times a day with all manner of cool stuff.

In reality, however, I’m forced today to spend yet another day NOT sitting in front of the computer writing. Which means no postings today. Which I hate. I hope to get back into the swing of things by next week.

Meanwhile, Josh Lucas’s restraining order against me has been extended to 2000 feet. Thank god Ben & Jerry’s is available in the supermarket.

Welcome to June. In New York City, at least, June is all, "Hey, suckers, you thought you'd get spring? Heh! Try 85 degrees and sticky on for size, why don't you, and start praying for October."

Meanwhile, enjoy these cool (and semi-cool) Junes: June Carter, who got to kiss Johnny Cash; Joon, who got to kiss Johnny Depp; and June Cleaver, who got to kiss Ward. Ew.

(Technorati tags: June Carter, Joon, June Cleaver, geek, dork, nerd)