EXCELSIOR, YOU FATHEAD!

GETTIN' MAD BOUT SCIENCE-FICTION

2013-05-18T06:06:09Z

IF YOU COULDN'T TELL BY ALL THE CAPS I WENT AND SAW THE NEW STAR TREK FILM TONIGHT AND THEN I WENT TO REDBONES AND DRANK SOME VERY GOOD BEER, NOT KANAR, AND ATE SOME VERY GOOD FOOD BUT MY MOUTH IS STILL TAINTED WITH THE TASTE OF SOME VERY STUPID FILMMAKING

Let's get this out of the way first, then, before delving into the spoilers:

Star Trek Into Darkness has a running time of one hundred thirty-three minutes. The first one hundred and thirteen minutes aren't all that bad; in fact, I was rather enjoying the film. As with the 2009 JJ Abrams Trek, I was perfectly happy settling into the new film. Okay, this is new Trek, let's have some fun with the new characters, let's give them new space adventures and stuff, let's watch as our New Kirk and New Spock and New Bones and New Uhura and New Sulu and New Scotty and even New Chekov do their New Thang.

AND THEN IT HAPPENED
AND THE ENTIRE THEATER DID NOT ACT AS JJ ABRAMS WANTED US TO ACT
NOBODY WENT "OH MY GOD WOW THAT IS SO AWESOME, TOTALLY UNEXPECTED, AND JUST WHAT THIS MOVIE NEEDED"
EVERYBODY PRETTY MUCH GODDAMNED GROANED
AND I SAID OUT LOUD "YOU HAVE GOT TO BE SHITTING ME"
AND NOBODY TOLD ME TO SHUSH SO THE AUDIENCE WAS BY INFERENCE IN AGREEMENT OR SOMETHING

Before I completely bitch about WHAT HAPPENED, I gotta start near the beginning of the goddamn thing.

Okay, so it was no big surprise that Benedict Cumberbatch was playing a character who was this Trek universe's Khan. Even if you had been studiously avoiding spoilers during the entire production process, this thought must have hit your synapses at one point or another, and you may have chosen to believe it or decided to just wait and see. I can dig that.

And so it is in the film that we learn that indeed, Cumberbatch is Khan. For what that's worth. And at the point in which he reveals his name, it ain't worth shit. Cumberbatch makes this reveal early on in a SHOCKING SCENE FULL OF AMAZING SURPRISE. The problem was that this scene was pretty much set up to SURPRISE THE PANTS OFF THE AUDIENCE. I am reasonably sure this is how the shooting script went:

KHAN
My name is not John Morrison or Harrison or whatever you have been calling me for the past forty-five minutes. My name... is... KHAN.

FILM SCORE
(implied)
DUN DUN DUNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

AUDIENCE MEMBERS 1-40
HOLY CATS WHERE DID MY PANTS GO

AUDIENCE MEMBERS 41-99
OUR PANTS ARE INTACT THANKFULLY BUT WE SEEM TO HAVE SOILED OURSELVES IN SURPRISE

KIRK, MCCOY, SPOCK, WHOEVER ELSE WAS IN THE SCENE AT THE TIME
Okay, sure, whatever. We'll call you Khan from now on if it makes you happy.

The reveal means absolutely nothing to the characters in the film. This is the first chance the crew has had to, you know, actually talk to this guy. At this point, all they know is that A. he is a bad-ass motherfucker, B. he's a TERRIST out to destroy the Federation, and C. he'll kill anyone and everybody to get his way (or if he's just feeling cranky that day). But beyond that, nobody, absolutely nobody has any personal ties to the character. Except for Kirk, who's mad at this dude for killing off Christopher Pike (in what was really a brilliant tactical move) but that happened like ten minutes previously. Oh, and the audience, who presumably have either seen Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan or have heard it mentioned in passing that there was once this dude named Captain Kirk and this dude named Khan and they were bitter enemies in another timeline so wouldn't it be cool if this Khan dude shows up in this film timeline too.

So this dumbass dramatic reveal, pals, is fanservice, plain and simple.

There's more fanservice to come: Carol Marcus, whom you may remember as the brilliant scientist who was working on the Genesis Device in The Wrath of Khan (and one of Kirk's former lovers), shows up here in a much younger form and although she is not (yet) one of New Kirk's conquests, she has one scene in which she wears naught but bra and panties (presumably Federation regulation underwear.) Kirk is told not to look while she changes, but he's Kirk and of course he looks and so the camera does too.

So there's that. I mean, she is cute, but... there's that.

But back to Khan. It is pretty clear to me that JJ Abrams very much wanted to make his second Trek film his own Wrath of Khan and, okay, I guess that's fine. I mean, it worked for Roddenberry.

And our new Khan is in some respects much like the old one, being one of the genetically-engineered ubermenschy types who had to be dealt with, as he explains, three hundred years ago. Given that this film takes place in the year 2259, I'm sure we all remember the Freezing Of Those Ubermenschy-Types from contemporary television accounts and Billy Joel's classic song, "We Didn't Start The Fire"^[1]:

Little Rock, Pasternak, Mickey Mantle, Kerouac
Sputnik, Chou En-Lai, Bridge on the River Kwai
Lebanon, Charles de Gaulle, California baseball
Starkweather homicide, Khan and pals get frozen-fied

And herein lies the problem. Wrath of Khan the film and Khan the original-timeline villian worked because Khan had not only a backstory, but legitimate wrath. Kirk had fought Khan in a TOS episode, exiling him and his seventy-two ubermenschy followers to a crappy barely-inhabitable planet. When the second movie came round, we got a villain from the past with a serious grudge. The battle of wills between Kirk and Khan is epic because of that past.

In this film, Khan's just mad because some dudes, who weren't even from Starfleet because Starfleet didn't exist then, froze him and his pals three hundred years ago during the Eugenics War which is barely mentioned in passing during one of Khan's infodumps. (I don't think they even use the phrase "Eugenics War" or anything resembling a war.)

And then Khan is mad because Admiral Marcus (also known as Carol's Dad) is just using him so he decides to happily do whatever it takes to get his frozen uberpals back. Khan has no wrath, just the motivation to manipulate and scheme to achieve his goal and get his pals back. Kirk and Company are just in the way here.

See, Carol's Dad unfroze Khan because he wants to turn Starfleet all military-like, believing a war with the Klingons is inevitable, and naturally ubermenschy types are the perfect people to help him build the Dreadnought class of Starfleet bad-ass ships. Maybe if he gets Kirk to chase Khan to the Klingon homeworld and fire some torpedoes, which by the way are carrying Khan's frozen buddies, the Klingons will get pissed at this act of dishonorable aggression and start the war Marcus so desperately wants. Then he can bring out his Super Awesome Surprise Dreadnought Class ship, say "SURPRISE MOTHERFUCKERS", and blow all the Klingons to Stovokor. Right? Right? Is anybody still following this? Hello?! Testing, testing, one, two...

Hey, remember those Klingons? We see them in exactly one scene and they're all wearing helmets except for one who takes his off to speak to Uhura and he looks kinda like Ving Rhames with piercings up his nose ridges. Then after they all get shot up they just kind of disappear from the film because it really is supposed to be All About Khan, even though we're reminded several times that the Enterprise, which was conveniently disabled near the Klingon homeworld, is bound to be discovered by the angry Klingon dudes Any Minute Now. WHICH NEVER HAPPENS.

The film, and the inevitable Klingon War Which Doesn't Happen Here, would have been just fine had the villain not been Khan. We could have had a new villain (he could have even been ubermenschy) and Admiral Marcus' scheming and the Klingon Empire getting all uppity over this bullshit and the Dreadnought coming out and Kirk & Co. trying desperately to stop a war from starting for all the wrong reasons.

But no. This is JJ Abrams' Wrath of Khan.

And it still would have gone okay had it not been for the last twenty minutes of the film. Because Abrams makes a tremendous tactical mistake. So far, the pieces he's used from Wrath of Khan have been conceptual and thematic. Ubermenschy types, cryostasis, seventy-two frozen dudes, a babe named Carol Marcus who is so totally gonna bang Kirk, that kind of thing. Now, Abrams and his screenwriters tire of having to actually write an original story on their own, so they grab some of the most iconic bits of the first movie for their own purposes. It doesn't fit, and it's NOT FAIR.

The erstwhile film deconstructor Mr. Plinkett mentioned, in his review of the 2009 Trek, that Abrams went through a lot to make the new Trek series accessible to as many viewers as possible while retaining elements everybody remembers. When you ask anyone what they know of Star Trek, even people who don't regularly watch the shows or movies, they still remember key aspects of the franchise which have made it into popular culture. Stuff like tribbles, phasers set to stun, a guy named Bones, and catchphrases such as "He's dead, Jim" and "Beam me up, Scotty". So he made sure to include these little tidbits in the film for fun. (And let's be fair here, it was enjoyable to hear Karl Urban say "Dammit Jim" and Zachary Quinto say "Fascinating" and Chris Pine act Kirk-cocky and all that.)

This film, however, goes beyond enjoyable catchphrase-having, though there's enough of that. When you ask people who remember seeing Wrath of Khan what they retained from the film, and then used it in Family Feud, the top three answers on the board would be these:

[3] THOSE MIND-CONTROLLING SLUGS
[2] SPOCK DYING IN THE ENGINE ROOM
[1] "KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!!!!"

I'm sorry, you're just going to have to imagine the "ding!" sound effects here
Also, I'm aware this is in reverse order but stay with me people

So as the film nears the end, Abrams and the screenwriters go "Damn! We gotta use some actual stuff from the original here or people might forget what it is we're rebooting or remaking or whatever the hell we're doing!" They wisely decide against using the mind-controlling slugs, but include the two most popular bits. However, since reboots are all about BEING CLEVER AND STUFF, the bits get switched around.

When the Enterprise's warp core goes whack-a-ding-hoy and someone needs to go into the radioactive engine room and fix it by kicking it (HEY WE DO THAT ALL THE TIME ON RED SHIFT), who goes this time? Why... Kirk! This time, Spock is the one who gets to watch, helpless, as his friend dies in the radiation-filled room next door, and they even put their hands up against the glass of the door again to give each other a final Vulcan salute. At this point, I'm thinking okay, this is sort of kind of clever, I'm interesting in seeing how they deal with Kirk dying here.

And that's when Spock, giving in to his half-human side, looks up for no reason and hollers "KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!!!!"

THAT'S IT. YOU GOTTA BE SHITTING ME. DROP MIC. I'M OUT OF HERE.

That's what Abrams wanted us to cheer. The Khan reveal bedamned, he wanted us to love the way he brought back these elements of the first film and twisted 'em around. BUT IT SO DOESN'T WORK. IT WORKS JUST ABOUT AS WELL AS A DEAD SQUIRREL. Yes, Spock's human emotions drive the last part of the third act, where he has a super-big fistfight with Khan on top of no less than two flying things speeding through the streets of San Francisco. Spock angrily nerve pinches and mindmelds the fuck out of Khan until Uhura beams in and implores him to let Khan live because

because

oh god I can't believe I'm typing this

I'm going to ignore the whole Spock turning emotional thing being a story element because like pfft fuck that

help im trapped in a bad movie factory

because they need Khan's superhuman healing blood to bring Kirk back to life.

And that's what they do. One fade-out later, Kirk wakes up in a hospital bed, having been out for a few weeks and gosh he looks chipper and fine.

THAT'S IT AGAIN. WHERE'S THE MIC. I NEED TO DROP IT AGAIN. I'M OUT OF HERE.

Maybe you don't remember what it was like to be a Star Trek fan between the second and third movies. You see, we hadn't expected Wrath of Khan to end like it did. It was a serious shock when Spock FUCKING DIES. You thought Han Solo getting the Carbonite treatment at the end of The Empire Strikes Back was bad? This is a ZILLION times worse. I mean this is serious, Spock is kaput, he's GONE. His coffin is SHOT INTO SPACE.

Sure, it lands on the Genesis Planet while Kirk talks about possibilities, but STILL. HE DEAD JIM. And we had to wait until the next movie, which turned out to be titled The Search for Spock, to find out what happened to him.

In this movie, the total elapsed time of Captain Kirk's death is like two minutes. If that. This is like Dominic Deegan levels of shitty narrative tension. Oh no he's in troub-- no, he's fine. PHEW! I WOULD HAVE HATED TO HAVE HAD TO WORRY THERE.

And that's what made me so mad at the film, and sad besides. I mean, I was greatly enjoying parts of it: Simon Pegg is, as in the previous film, absolutely perfect as Scotty. Pegg is living his geek dream here, and much like his films with Edgar Wright, we get to enjoy his enjoyment. Our Chekov here is adorable when he's given command of Engineering--he barely knows what to do, and knows even less about how to sound reassuring when reporting escalating situations to the bridge. Sulu gets a turn in the captain's chair and you can tell he's not only good at it, he really likes it. (Excelsior, here you come, buddy!) Uhura and Spock have the world's most passive-aggressive lover's spat, which I imagine is like any lover's spat involving a Vulcan, Uhura faces down an angry Klingon because remember she knows languages, and Kirk learns a little bit about himself by the time the film's over. Khan's scheming is clever at the start, causing one disaster simply to get all the Starfleet brass in one place as per their protocols to discuss what to do next (and then getting attacked by Khan's Awesome Flying Shooty Thing), even when you'd have thought they would've planned to meet someplace safer. Like an underground bunker or something.

And as I said before, this would have been a slam-bang Trek adventure if Wrath of Khan hadn't been so painfully shoehorned into it all. Seriously, if you were to remove the last 20 minutes of the film and dub a name like "Felix Evilman" over every instance of the name "Khan", you'd have a great adventure on your hands. And that's what we really want out of Star Trek: great adventure. The film ends on a promising note; Kirk takes a brand-new Enterprise out on a five-year mission and in spite of all the crap heaped upon us in the previous act, I desperately wished they'd make a TV series out of it. It would be expensive as hell but it would be fun. They even open the movie with a promising episode, even, involving a primitive species and an exploding volcano and Kirk having his way with the Prime Directive to save them. It's just as a series should be, and I would watch the hell out of it.

I just don't want to watch stuff like The Pissed-Offness of Khan, which is what I got and which JJ Abrams, despite his best intentions and clear skill at bringing back a beloved space opera franchise, did not deserve to make. He did not earn the right to do this as far as I'm concerned. And that's the most damning thing of all.

1. Yes, I know the Eugenics War happens in the late 1990s as per original Trek canon, but I really wanted to use "frozen-fied" in a song lyric.

I did not make this, but I would watch this.

2013-05-17T07:38:10Z

Repeatedly.

All season in a game

2013-04-11T07:55:11Z

It was one of those days.

Sonya and I were deciding how to spend our afternoon and evening. I'd been ensconced in some decidedly anti-social creative work for the past two days, trying desperately to refill my Interaction Tolerance before going back in for three more days of Red Shift performances starting tomorrow. (It's the Spring Sci-Fi Spectacular, running this Thursday, Friday and Saturday! We're doing a new Red Shift episode and then an adaptation of the classic ant sci-fi flick THEM! See if it you can! Or come to the special event at the MIT Museum on Sunday the 21st!)

At any rate, today was the first day I felt like I could conceivably go out and do things and actually hold conversations with people instead of merely grunt-whimpering and ducking back in my room for to stare at a computer screen, so we decided to have a grand day out together. We planned to head out around 3:00 or so, and had very much wanted to visit a museum. Unfortunately the Museum of Science, which we can walk to from Sonya's house, closed at 5:00 and it seemed like a waste to just go for an hour or so. The Museum of Fine Arts stays open until 9:00 or so on Wednesday nights, so we got the idea to go eat in the Back Bay and then walk over to the museum.

"Ooh," I said, "We can walk into Kenmore and then take my favorite shortcut past Fenway Park to Park Drive, then walk across the Fens to the museum... oh, wait, that's only if it's not a game day." Kenmore is an absolute zoo on game day, and so is Yawkey Way, the thoroughfare that goes right by the park. I did what any good Internet-using person would do, and checked the Red Sox website. Sure enough, there was a game today, the second game in their opening week series against the Baltimore Orioles. On a whim, I checked the tickets page and found tickets available in a price range I felt comfortable in. This was very surprising for several reasons, the first of which being that there was a price range at Fenway I felt comfortable in. Being the smallest and oldest ballpark in America, tickets don't come cheap.

The second reason this was surprising was that the Red Sox have sold out every home game since May of 2003. I've never checked the ticket office on the day of a game. It's always felt like a foregone conclusion. Doubly so if the Yankees are in town; those games sell out quicker than ice cream on a hot day as soon as tickets go on sale in the winter. I don't truck with ticket brokers even after having worked with them on a business-to-business basis for four years; they're banking on you thinking you can't acquire tickets any other way. (And yet I felt it was a foregone conclusion...) This, however, felt like another stroke of strange luck to me, and I decided we most certainly should take advantage of it. Sonya, who hadn't been to a home game in years, thought it was a terrific idea, so we immediately secured two grandstand seats and felt pretty damn chuffed about the whole thing.

Dinner was at the Salty Pig in the Back Bay, a place Sonya and I went to on one of our first dates last year. It has since become one of our favorite places to go when we're feeling a little flush and want to eat pig parts and smelly cheese. (No, really. That's how the menu lists their offerings.) I'd tell you what we had but it would turn into some kind of Redwall chapter only with meat instead of acorn pie with clotted cream or whatever it is those nutty rodents are eating this time around. We did, however, have some awesome bone marrow in a huge cross-section. After dinner it took us around twenty minutes to walk down Boylston to Fenway Park, bypassing Kenmore Square by way of Ipswich. It's quicker and you don't have to brave that bridge across I-90 teeming with insane hawkers, touts and scalpers, and you don't have to step around people cramming themselves into the Cask 'n Flagon. This put us in about an hour before gametime.

This is the best time of all.

Countless writers both sports- and non- have described the feeling of walking up from underneath the stands and emerging, blinking, into an open space with a beautiful ballpark all around you. Fenway Park gets you every. Single. Time. We walked up into the bleachers and stood around the bullpen for a while, watching the Oriole outfielders run after some practice hits. You can do that here. Down below, kids and their parents were hanging out on the edge of the fence, clamoring for balls and joking with the guy in right field. You can do that here. "All right, which one of you booed?" the Oriole said, hands on hips, after a solitary boo from the box seats heralded his fine catch. The kids all laughed, and he grinned back. You can do that here.

As it got closer to game time we headed towards our grandstand seats along the first base line. Our row was the second to last and it didn't matter. In any other park this would be considered a nosebleed seat, but Fenway is so small and intimate that you don't feel far from the field at all. (Even the bleacher seats by center field don't feel so darn far away to the Fenway Faithful.) It's true that in the grandstand you run the risk of having a support pole in the way and the overhang prevents you from seeing 2/3 of the giant scoreboard, but we lucked out in the pole department and who needs the giant scoreboard anyway?

We were among the first to take our seats and the crowd filtered slowly in as we got closer to 7:10 pm. It's a slow trickle and really doesn't stop until around the third inning when the final stragglers, who naturally are sitting in the middle of your row, try to scoot on down. It had begun to drizzle as the grounds crew spread about dry dirt on the infield, and by the time we'd had the Honorary Bat Boys-For-A-Day and Blood Donor of the Day introduced and the nice schoolteacher from Waltham sang the national anthem (she kept it short and sweet, no grandstanding, no unnecessary melisma, A+++ would listen to again) we could see the light rain coming down, illuminated by the park's giant lights. This was something I only usually see on TV. I don't think I've ever been to Fenway in threateningly-inclement weather. While it looked dramatic, the rain wasn't heavy enough to prevent play, and the grounds crew spread around dry infield dirt at the top of every inning or so.

The game began ignobly with the Orioles taking a quick 1-0 lead in the first inning. Our starting pitcher was Ryan Dempster, making his Fenway Park debut. He came to us from the White Sox, one of the many new players making up this season's Red Sox roster after last year's circus of failure with manager Bobby Valentine as the ringmaster of disaster. (I will never forgive Valentine for many things, not the least of which is trading Kevin Youkilis away.) We're waiting to see what our new manager John Farrell will do once he gets warmed up and we're just thrilled to watch Jackie Bradley, Jr starting his major league career because the kid's gonna go places believe you me, but the fact of the matter is that we got a lot of new blood this season and, at the start of this game, the Sox led the American League East with a respectable 5-2 record for the first week of play.

But even with that kind of start putting a spring in your step (suck it, Yankees!) you must never expect anything from the Red Sox. This is the team that can suddenly and inexplicably collapse under a ton of positive momentum, the team that somehow forgets to win when it counts, the team that breaks your heart in October after winning it over in July and August. The philosophy a good Red Sox fan must have, besides the old bromide "There's always next year", is best summed up by an exchange I heard on a sports radio show many many years ago, well before 2004. As I remember it, the Sox had had a strong April start then and were doing great as May went along.

"So do you think this is The Year?" a caller asked the radio host. He pronounced the capital T and Y, as you do.
"No," replied the sage of the airwaves, "but I do think this is The Month of May."

As a Red Sox fan, you learn to enjoy your victories as you get them, but never to count on them building up to something bigger. You will almost invariably be let down. I'm talking Bill Buckner, I'm talking Bucky F'n Dent, I'm talking Pedro Martinez staying in the game after pointing at the sky. I'm also talking any number of post-season fizzles, and years we never even made the playoffs. We go out with both bangs and whimpers.

The Sox weren't too happy with that run so they decided to take one for themselves in the second inning. And two more in the third. Baltimore, thinking it unfair, took two as well in the fourth, and it would have made for a fun ballgame if it wasn't rife with errors and what felt like rookie mistakes. Dempster, for example, couldn't seem to find the strike zone with both hands and a map. He consistently kept throwing low and to the left. To be fair he wasn't bad on strikes, when he threw one, but every time he threw a ball, it was low and to the left. And he was throwing lots of balls.

Sonya said, "He's obviously got some specialty which is just not working for him tonight." I agreed; he's probably got some kind of wicked slider which on a good day barely brushes up against the edge of the strike zone. But he was throwing mostly fastballs landing that way. Sonya said maybe they should have let him warm up with a few pitches before the first inning, you know, to get him ready or something. She also thought maybe he should rely another strategy because this one tonight seemed to be "peg the batter in the foot".

"Try something new already!" she cried out to him, after yet another pitch gone southwest. So he threw high and to the right. "That's not what I was looking for!" Sonya responded. You can do that here. To be fair (again) Dempster played defense very well, successfully covering first after a near-disastrous bobble on Mike Napoli's part. Even so, his pitching was woeful enough that I started calling him Mr. Noodle out of frustration. "No, Mr. Noodle!" I said. "Throw the baseball across the plate!" Finally, after watching our erstwhile catcher Jarrod Saltalamacchia picking up way too many balls in the dirt ("Hey, Salty! Looks like the game's picking up!") I sighed "Maybe Dempster's praying for a rainout with the game tied at this point."

He almost got one. The rain had been picking up steadily since the third inning and after the bottom of the fifth, the infield was getting swampy despite the best efforts of the grounds crew and their seemingly inexhaustible supply of fresh dry dirt. As the Orioles retired our side, the ump waved his hands and a cadre of red-shirted crewmembers started dancing a jig on a giant roll of white tarpaulin. (No, seriously, that's how they started it rolling.) Once rolled out they unfolded it once, twice, and then finally a third time, spreading a lovely corporate logo across the entire infield.

They got the best applause of anybody in the entire game.

We decided to wait out the rain delay, because we didn't have anywhere to be any time soon and as far as I'm concerned, it's always better to wait it out than it is go home and realize you missed something incredibly awesome. Sometimes this produces failed results, like the time I waited out a Brooklyn Cyclones rain delay in an open grandstand only to have the game called forty-five minutes later. It hadn't even started yet. (Fortunately it was FREE T-SHIRT NIGHT and we all used ours as handy chair chamoises and rain cover. Thanks, whatever charity!)

We were thankfully covered in our Fenway grandstand seats, but as the rain continued to come down the entire lower sections emptied out. By the time the game thankfully resumed, thirty or forty minutes later, a full third of the stadium had gone home. So had Dempster, who was replaced by a succession of pitchers. I think we got one each subsequent inning. The Orioles did the same. Our patience paid off with a pair of back-to-back home runs: first by Daniel Nava over the Green Monster, and the second by good ol' Salty himself, powering one into the right field stands. The crowd, while lessened in number, grew in volume and enthusiasm. We'd weeded out the weak, you see. The Fenway Faithful had remained, and they had been well rewarded.

We kept our lead as the final innings progressed. I was impressed by the Orioles pitcher Daniel O'Day, who's got a brilliantly eclectic low profile pitch. Windup? What windup? I don't think he even raises a leg off the ground. Sonya said, "I keep thinking he's about to throw underhanded." He knocked our side out, one two three, before being replaced in the next inning. I don't know why. Perhaps tonight was Everybody Gets To Pitch Night.

Happily I sang along with Take Me Out To The Ballgame--rejoice, the one true Seventh Inning Stretch has returned, may we never again be subject to somebody's godawful murdering of God Bless America--and dutifully sang the chorus of Sweet Caroline at the bottom of the eighth, naturally including the counterpoint Neil Diamond never wrote. Someone in front of us had stood up and was thoughtfully performing an interpretive dance to illustrate hands, touching hands, reaching out, touching me, touching yooooooooou.

And then we entered the ninth with a new pitcher. Here came Joel Hanrahan, one of our new closers fresh from Pittsburgh. He was heralded by a big-ass display on all the scoreboards, booming bass and flashing HAMMER in big awesome letters. Awwww yeah! Forget Andrew Bailey, who just pitched a respectable eighth inning for us, walking only one and putting the next three down thank you kindly. Here comes THE HAMMER! Time to close the Orioles out, win the game, and go home!

Hanrahan heroically gives up a home run on his first at-bat. I should have known this would happen; the people in front of us simply got up and left as we took the field for the ninth. No! No! No! Remember what I said about missing out on something awesome? Well, yes, it's pretty bad, but it's inspiring awe among the remaining fans all right and somebody's now missing it.

The HAMMER recovers, strikes Matt Wieters out, and then we get a second out after Will Middlebrooks chases a pop in foul territory. He's a good guy, that Middlebrooks. Now all that's left is one out. One single, solitary out. Three strikes, a well-caught line drive, a dribbling blooper up the first base line, you see where I'm going here. Oh yeah.

The HAMMER gives up a hit, and allows the pinch runner to steal second. He walks the next two batters. How did we allow the bases to get loaded here?! With every new dispiriting development the Sox fans, who had moments before been standing on their feet clapping and stomping for the last out, turn sour. The HAMMER gets booed. Every new Oriole batter gets booed, no matter how good or badly he's played or how much of a threat he represents. The second pinch runner gets booed. Then Hanrahan throws a wild pitch at Manny Machado and Alexi Casilla scores from third. The boos get louder. Now we're tied, and we're gonna sit here for another inning half at least. (But we're gonna sit here, dammit; it ain't over until Yogi Berra says something silly.)

And on the next pitch, Machado hits a three-run homer and suddenly the Orioles are up by three. The Sox don't give up any more runs, but they don't recover either. The bottom of the ninth is best left undescribed. Final score Baltimore 8, Boston 5.

So it goes.

It was an accurate encapsulation of a Red Sox season, honestly: A shaky start, an encouraging leap forward, a strange setback or two, a crowning moment of damn fine glory (I've never seen back-to-back homers at Fenway before!) and then a completely absurd meltdown leading to an ignominious end. I couldn't have been happier to have seen it with Sonya. You can't stay mad at the Red Sox. You can boo 'em, and that certainly happened tonight, but you can't stay mad for long. Hanrahan took his loss in stride during the post-game interview: "That's the life of a reliever. One day you're the goat, the next day you're the hero. That's just how it goes. I'll come in tomorrow ready to go." And that's what they do, day in, day out. I know Dempster is going to come in some day this season and absolutely blow the other team away. Maybe he'll pitch a no-hitter. (Derek Lowe did in 2002, and he was a notoriously lousy closer. He did much better once they let him start for a change.)

And you can't begrudge your attendance, either. A game at Fenway is a wonderful experience no matter how the Sox manage to louse things up. That's why Fenway Park still stands, that's why we won't let 'em tear the thing down to build a godawful shiny shrine to corporate America (and some baseball team or other.) That's why you go. You sit in your slightly uncomfortable seat, you watch the kids interacting with the players, you grin as the park organist goes effortlessly from David Bowie to a medley of rain songs, you enjoy an activity generations before you have enjoyed in that very spot. And you start it all by walking up through that tunnel into the fresh air and green grass and the very spirit of baseball all around you. You think of the stories of games past, and you remember stories of games you've witnessed. Cal Ripken's last Fenway appearance? I was there. Mo Vaughn's return as a player for Oakland (and getting an ovation?) I was there. Somewhere in a seat nearby, someone reminisces about Carlton Fisk's home run in '75. He was there. (Maybe. I think that particular World Series game is the Woodstock of Red Sox games.)

However, I should not have felt so surprised about snagging gameday tickets. Near the end of the game the announcer gave us the number of paid attendances that evening, and then added that this was the first Red Sox home game since May, 2003 to not be sold out. The longest attendance streak in Major League Baseball, 820 sold-out games (794 of them regular season), has ended.

And we were there.

"HUSTLER COMING THROUGH!"

2013-03-20T20:43:16Z

Imagine my joy when I learned that Grand Theft Auto IV for the PC has a video editor and that you can save tons of wacky clips any time you like.

BEHOLD, THEN, the all-action sometimes-cussing epic NIKO BELLIC PAYS A VISIT.

The Director's Cut may include an actual ending!

THIS IS TOTALLY HOW IT WORKS ON THE INTERNET

2013-03-17T06:24:46Z

And now it's time for
ANITA SARKEESIAN READS INTERNET COMMENTS
by AngryVideoGameMRAGuy69, age 28

INT. STUDY - DAY
[ANITA SARKEESIAN reads COMMENTS posted on the INTERNET.]

ANITA
The guy who spelled "feminazi" with two Zs sure made some salient points. I'm going to change my opinions right away!

[ANITA changes her OPINIONS right away.]

fin
A ~~PLANET CRACKPIPE~~ REDDIT PRODUCTION

And then Jefferson says "The darker the berry the sweeter the juice, amirite bro?"

2013-03-14T04:18:26Z

Last night I started playing Assassin's Creed 3 on account of it somehow finding its way into my Steam library earlier this year. I've enjoyed the Assassin's Creed series for its fun gameplay, a nice combination of building-hopping parkour and stab-you-in-the-face sneak attacking, but mostly I really appreciate the world design in the games. The developers have gone to great lengths to replicate historic cities, including Renaissance-era Rome, Venice, and Constantinople (not yet Istanbul). While not to scale, all the Important Landmarks are anatomically correct and more or less in their place so you can, say, climb around the Hagia Sophia all you want and honestly, who hasn't wanted to?

This made me excited for AC3, as its setting is the American Colonies in the 18th century. More specifically, it's set in Boston, Philadelphia and New York, with Boston being the first city you play in. Hot damn, said I, it'll be a lot of fun running around Colonial Boston, climbing on Faneuil Hall and such!

The Boston in the game did not disappoint. It's a compressed version of Boston circa 1755. As with the previous game worlds, the streets aren't entirely accurate, but much of Boston's colonial landmarks are faithfully recreated and located in their proper places. Look west-southwest from the top of Faneuil Hall (curiously missing its grasshopper weathervane, though the in-game encyclopedia mentions it) and you'll see the State House, King's Church, and the Old South Church where they should be in relation to one another. Beacon Hill is a loaf-shaped grassy hill crowned by a huge iron pot full of tar suspended from a tall wooden pole. Since this is Assassin's Creed, you can climb to the top of the beacon, look all around, then take a graceful swan dive off the top and land safely in a pile of hay below. It's called a Leap of Faith. You get to perform many of them.

Even smaller landmarks from which you can't exactly jump are included, and the game happily unlocks encyclopedia entries upon your first encounter with each. You can run across the Causeway past the old Mill Pond to get to Copp's Hill and Christ Church in the North End. (Christ Church is now known as the Old North Church; the first Old North Church was dismantled by the British during their siege. They needed the wood for fuel.)

You'll also find the Bunch of Grapes tavern, the Old Corner Book-Shop (even back then things in Boston were old) and the Liberty Tree in your travels. Many of your Boston-based missions start in the Green Dragon tavern. I think I saw Cambridge across the Charles, but I don't know if I'll actually get to run around Harvard Yard or if it's just backdrop decoration. I have ridden to Lexington and Concord, though. (That's as far as I've gotten in the game and I'm trying as best I can to avoid spoilers.) I really can't wait to see how Philadelphia and New York measure up to this level of verisimilitude. I'm not as familiar with those cities as I am Boston, but I do know my way around all three fairly well.

The game's writing, sadly, is not as sharp as its world design. As in the previous games, you get the chance to meet up with FAMOUS PEOPLE FROM HISTORY! and get quests from them. In Assassin's Creed II, for example, you meet up with both Niccolo Machiavelli and a young Leonardo da Vinci while running around Florence. Leo becomes a real pal and gives you plenty of chances to play with his greatest inventions throughout the game, including his tank and flying machine. Of course the flying machine is included. How could it not be?

Since these are works of fiction, the historical characters get dialogue shoved into their mouths and this is where the problem begins. I don't know how out-of-character Machiavelli and da Vinci got, since I am not as familiar with their histories as I am with, say, Benjamin Franklin's. He's the first big historical figure you meet in Assassin's Creed 3. There are other PEOPLE FROM HISTORY! who act as NPCs, but Franklin is the first Big Name you meet. I have been promised more, and I am looking forward to shaking hands with Benedict Arnold.

Ben is quite upset when you first run into him. Loose pages of his Poor Richard's Almanack have gone flying off through the streets of Boston and naturally he would very much like you, a complete stranger, to find them. So begins a side quest you work on as you're doing everything else in the game. When you collect all four, you get to read a nice excerpt from the publication and earn some cash. This is the level of interactivity you get with FAMOUS PERSONS FROM HISTORY!.

Once you start chatting with Ben, the anachronisms pile up and the history pedant gets annoyed. It's one thing to run around a fictional, paraphrased version of a city, but it's another to see historical figures saying and doing things they wouldn't at the time. Some are minor and probably easily explained: Franklin was living in Philadelphia by 1755, for instance, though it's implied he's a Boston resident in-game. He could be just visiting Boston, of course, but the game doesn't want to say either way. Ben does, however, mention "his new book, an Almanac" as if introducing its concept, yet the first Poor Richard's was published in 1732.

Still, these are tiny tiny nitpicks compared to a subsequent scene, in which Benjamin expresses the desire for the American colonies to be equals with Britain, not under their rule. Perhaps, he argues, they should even be an independent entity. After all, everybody wants independence as they grow older, and America is certainly old enough.

Uh, no.

It's a popular misconception that Franklin was for American independence from day one. We Americans very much want to think that since he is one of our most beloved historical figures, right up there with Washington, Lincoln, and Hulk Hogan. He was so wise and learned, naturally he'd want freedom and liberty ringing throughout the land! Maybe he even came up with the idea! But that's not true at all, at least not in 1755. Franklin was a true Royalist then. He did indeed hold the ideological belief that the colonies could co-exist equally with Britain, but his loyalties were still to the Crown.

Good Imperial relations were important. Franklin may not have liked the Stamp Act of 1765, but he initially supported it as any good subject would have. This made him unpopular among his revolutionary peers, some of whom even threatened to burn down his home in Philadelphia. He eventually realized the overall negative impact the Stamp Act had on the colonies, and helped successfully petition Parliament for a repeal. (Good leaders and statesmen listen to all sides of an argument, and it is not--and should not be--a mark of shame if their opinion changes. Sucks to your flip-flops, demagogues.)

It wasn't until the late 1760s that Franklin gradually accepted the fact that the Crown would not grant the colonies autonomous status. If they desired equal footing, they'd have to achieve it themselves. While Franklin saw it from economical and political perspectives, he hadn't quite grasped the attitude the British government had towards the colonies. The final, cruel blow came in 1774, when Franklin was laughed out of the House of Lords while petitioning against four punitive laws which American patriots called "the Intolerable Acts". These acts included closing the port of Boston until the East India Company was repaid for the damages incurred by the Boston Tea Party and giving the king complete authority over appointing government officials in Massachusetts. (The governor could also appoint government positions, but guess who chose the governor?)

It was then Franklin learned that the British government thought the colonies were a laughably provincial lot who needed to stay under the yoke of British rule. Maybe he suspected it, but it had to be shoved in his face for him to admit it. As much as Ben wanted to be a good Englishman, he wanted his home to prosper and flourish and that wasn't going to happen as long as he and his fellow countrymen were treated as inferiors and subjugated accordingly.

So he went home to Philadelphia, sang several songs with John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, and the Declaration of Independence was born.

Anyway, such details might be considered inconsequential when inserted into a videogame. It's true that a fictitious Benjamin Franklin's opinions aren't technically affecting the gameplay one way or another. But when such care has been taken to re-create and interpret historical locations in a game engine, surely the historical figures could be portrayed and interpreted accurately as well. AC3 is trying very hard, even through a contemporary filter, to maintain some kind of historical and cultural balance, tipping neither towards traditional, hackneyed stereotypes nor out-and-out revisionism. This just makes the discrepancies that do slip through all the more glaring.

I wonder what else awaits. Personally I'm hoping for a rapping Sam Adams.

Unrelated cat!

2013-03-06T03:58:59Z

Abbie and Figment are friends.

And I, the Tomfool, love you.

2013-03-06T03:43:30Z

Tonight Sonya (known on this site as sovay) and I proposed to each other on the first anniversary of our being Together as a Couple. I don't think I would have thought a year ago at this time that we would end up like this, but here we are and I could not possibly be any happier.

We knew this was going to happen for a while now, but wanted to wait until we had survived at least one year together before making it Official. By Official I guess I kind of mean "announcing it to the Internet" but also actually performing a ritual. It's not The Expected Ritual; neither of us are sticklers for tradition, especially for tradition's sake. I did not want to be The Guy and be the only one asking so as to put her on the spot, as we are equals in all that we do. Sonya didn't want any of the traditional engagement stuff involving diamonds, and she also really wanted to propose to me as well. There really was never any question of "who gets to propose to whom". We just Knew.

That is what draws us together, and that is what we celebrate every time we kiss, murmur affectionately to each other, or even just glance over and smile.

We went out for dinner tonight, first at Cambridge Brewing Company for dinner and then The Friendly Toast for dessert. These restaurants were not chosen for any special significance other than the fact that we like eating there. Ascribing anything more would have been superfluous. We have shared plenty of incredible meals together in the past year and we shall have plenty more. After a terrific dinner of duck cassoulet and mussels in a mustard-bacon sauce, plus some nice beers, we sauntered over to the Toast for dessert and drinks.

Here we are sitting at our back corner table at the Toast.

We proposed by swapping books: I gave Sonya a Tom Swift yellowback, and she gave me a second-edition printing of The Lady's not for Burning. They represent strange science and cynics in love, both of which are very dear principles to us. These books are the beginning of our new shared library. Libraries are also very important.

The "Repelatron Skyway" was particularly apt because the Toast features Tom Swift covers on its wallpaper, and no matter where we've sat in the past year we inevitably get to see this one.

Each book is inscribed with The Question, Popped; we accepted by writing responses. I never thought I'd ever propose to someone with a Tom Swiftie, but there you go. (Click to enlarge any of the pics in case you can't make out the writing.)

The appropriate quote from The Lady's not for Burning, one of several, I guess, is this:

JENNET. Fifty years or so and then I promise
To let you go.
THOMAS. Do you see these roofs and spires?
There sleep hypocrisy, porcous pomposity, greed,
Lust, vulgarity, cruelty, trickery, sham
And all possible nitwittery--are you suggesting fifty
Years of that?
JENNET. I was only suggesting fifty
Years of me.
THOMAS. Girl, you haven't changed the world.
Glimmer as you will, the world's not changed.
I love you, but the world's not changed.

We had the realization last night that while everything will indeed change for us with this, things still do stay the same. We have mostly the same lives, same goals, same feelings as before, but everything has changed. Oh, dichotomy.

There was an exchange of rings, because that symbolism needn't be eschewed for the sake of keeping DeBeers out of our lives and wallets. For the longest time Sonya has had two silver rings in the shape of cats. She's not sure from where she got them or what she planned to do with them, but we found a good use.

Sonya's cats fit nicely in her sundial ring. I am in love with someone who wears a sundial for a ring. Need I elaborate?

Then we celebrated with froofy drinks (the red one has Pop Rocks on the rim!) and a Bananas Foster pancake for dessert. Like you do. Like we do.

Details schmetails will be forthcoming. Except for "sometime in 2014" we have not set a date but we plan to have a small interfaith ceremony for our families with my father and a cantor friend presiding, and then hold a screwball film festival at the Somerville Theater for our friends. How can you pass up the opportunity to hold a wedding with program notes, for crying out loud? Weddings in general give me hives, so I want to make sure everybody who wishes to celebrate with us has the chance to do so, yet without the social obligations that usually go along with that kind of thing (table placements, overly-elaborate RSVPs, registry-related guilt, the Goddamn Chicken Dance.)

The fact of the matter is that I love Sonya very much and she loves me very much and we love who we are together. We wish to share a future together and this is just our way of saying all of that.

Also hey, LJ and how you doin.

Minecrafting: The Chamber of Science

2013-02-15T05:59:26Z

Ever since more-or-less finishing up the dark ride Jinx I have been working on a second Minecraft dark ride project. The current project has taken on the name Chamber of Science due mostly to the fact that I've been doing all my fribbulous redstone circuitry work, including the light displays and adding machine, in that flat world.

Naturally one must apply the principles one has learned to one's dark rides.

THE CHAMBER OF SCIENCE AWAITS

This circuitry is part of the innards of the third stunt (that's dark ride lingo for "something cool happening", more or less) in the Chamber of Science.

The ride's layout passes through these innards, a eight-bit memory array, so you can relax undt watchen das blinkenlights. The white light cubes on the left are just for illumination, though the columns strobe very slowly since they're connected to the circuitry what drives the lights for the stunt.

The stunt itself is an eight-character message board which cycles through eight cheery messages as your cart goes past.

The light sequencer is driven by a Crude Yet Effective^TM minecart timer. When active, the little cart runs around clockwise at a constant rate, hitting that round trigger track once per go. It is currently stopped on its brake because it's annoying to do anything constructive with a huge piece of circuitry running. To keep processors happy (and save redstone energy!) the Chamber of Science stunts are only active while the cart is in its scene area.

If the stunts kept running even while nobody was around, not only would your processor start crying, but the constant sound of pistons EVERYWHERE would drive you absolutely bonkers. This is the first major scene in the Chamber of Science, happily named The Hall of Pistons. There are four piston-based stunts in this scene and they are all active as you go past. You probably won't get a chance to see them all in one go, which means this thing has RE-RIDEABILITY like nobody's bidniss.

I've taken quite a liking recently to MCEdit, the program that lets you fiddle with whole chunks of Minecraft worlds. I've been using it to paste in numerous identical large objects, such as the ribs of this vaulted ceiling. It's like putting together a bunch of prefabricated parts!

The Chamber of Science's queue area is a collection of historical exhibits showcasing technological achievements in the Minecraft universe, such as the furnace and anvil. And there are a few more.

History taught while you wait!

Next time, let's look at the memory matrix and stuff.

This is what happens when we skive off actual Red Shift work

2013-02-04T21:32:13Z

The Internet just gave me this pulp cover generator and so naturally I threw stuff from the REDSHIFTIVERSE (pat. pending) into it just to see what would happen. Otherwise known as FOR SCIENCE.

I think I got it all out of my system. For today.

EDIT: Not quite; here's one more for Billy THE DEMANDING LITTLE SO-AND-SO.

as is the tradition around these parts

2012-11-22T17:23:31Z

Town Transfer Station
1 West Stockbridge Road
Stockbridge, MA 01262

Hours:

Monday thru Friday 7:30am - 3:30pm
Saturday 9 - 3:30
Sunday's from May through October from 11am - 1:00pm

This song is called Alice's Restaurant
And it's about Alice
And the restaurant
But Alice's Restaurant is not the name of the restaurant, that's just the name of the song, and that's why I called the song Alice's Restaurant.

You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant
You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant
Walk right in, it's around the back
Just a half a mile from the railroad track
And you can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant.

Now it all started two Thanksgivings ago, two years ago on Thanksgiving, when my friend and I went up to visit Alice at the restaurant. But Alice doesn't live in the restaurant, she lives in the church near by the restaurant, in the belltower with her husband Ray and Fasha the dog. And livin' in the belltower like that, they got a lotta room downstairs where the pews used to be in. Havin' all that room, seein as how they took out all the pews, they decided that they didn't have to take out their garbage for a long time.

We got up there, we found all the garbage in there, and we decided it'd be a friendly gesture for us to take the garbage down to the city dump, so we took the half a ton of garbage, put it in the back of a red VW microbus, took shovels and rakes and implements of de-struction, and headed on toward the city dump.

Well, we got there and there was a big sign and a chain across the dump saying "Closed on Thanksgiving" and we had never heard of a dump closed on Thanksgiving before, and with tears in our eyes we drove off into the sunset looking for another place to put the garbage.

We didn't find one.

Until we came to a side road, and off the side of the side road was another fifteen foot cliff and at the bottom of the cliff there was another pile of garbage, and we decided that one big pile is better than two little piles, and rather than bring that one up we decided to throw ours down. That's what we did, and drove back to the church, had a Thanksgiving dinner that couldn't be beat, went to sleep and didn't get up until the next morning...

When we got a phone call
from Officer Obie.

He said "Kid, we found your name on an envelope at the bottom of a half a ton of garbage, and just wanted to know if you had any information about it." And I said "Yes sir, Officer Obie, I cannot tell a lie, I put that envelope under that garbage."

After speaking to Obie for about forty-five minutes on the telephone we finally arrived at the truth of the matter and said that we had to go down and pick up the garbage, and also had to go down and speak to him at the police officer's station. So we got in the red VW microbus with the shovels and rakes and implements of destruction and headed on toward the police officer's station.

Now, friends, there was only one or two things that Obie coulda done at the police station, and the first was he could have given us a medal for being so brave and honest on the telephone, which wasn't very likely and we didn't expect it,

and the other thing was that he could have bawled us out and told us never to be seen driving garbage around the vicinity again, which is what we expected,

but when we got to the police officer's station there was a third possibility that we hadn't even counted upon, and we was both immediately arrested.

Handcuffed.

And I said "Obie, I don't think I can pick up the garbage with these handcuffs on."

He said "Shut up, kid. Get in the back of the patrol car."

And that's what we did, we sat in the back of the patrol car and drove to the Quote Scene of the Crime Unquote.

I want to tell you about the town of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where this happened here, they got three stop signs, two police officers, and one police car

but when we got to the Scene of the Crime there was five police officers and three police cars, being the biggest crime of the last fifty years, and everybody wanted to get in the newspaper story about it.

And they was usin' up all kinds of cop equipment that they had hanging around the police officer's station, they was takin' plaster tire tracks, foot prints, dog smellin' prints, and they took twenty-seven eight-by-ten color glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explainin what each one was to be used as evidence against us, took pictures of the approach, the getaway, the northwest corner, the southwest corner

and that's not to mention
the aerial photography...

After the ordeal we went back to the jail. Obie said he was going to put us in the cell. Said "Kid, I'm going to put you in the cell, I want your wallet and your belt."

And I said "Obie, I can understand you wantin my wallet so I don't have any money to spend in the cell, but what do you want my belt for?"

And he said "Kid, we don't want any hangings."

I said "Obie, did you think I was going to hang myself for littering?"

Obie said he was making sure, and friends, Obie was, cause he took out the toilet seat so I couldn't hit myself over the head and drown, and he took out the toilet paper so I couldn't bend the bars, roll out -- roll the toilet paper out the window, slide down the roll and have an es-cape. Obie was making sure, and it was about four or five hours later that Alice

Remember Alice?
It's a song about Alice.

Alice came by and with a few nasty words to Obie on the side bailed us out of jail, and we went back to the church, had another Thanksgiving dinner that couldn't be beat, and didn't get up until the next morning,

when we all had to go to court.

We walked in, sat down, Obie came in with the twenty-seven eight-by-ten color glossy pictures with the circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one, sat down. Man came in, said "All rise." We all stood up, and Obie stood up with the twenty-seven eight-by-ten color glossy pictures, and the judge walked in, sat down with a seeing eye dog, and he sat down, and we sat down.

Obie looked at the seeing eye dog

and then at the twenty-seven eight-by-ten color glossy pictures with the circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one

And looked at the seeing eye dog

And then at the twenty-seven eight-by-ten color glossy pictures with the circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one and began to cry, cause Obie came to the realization that it was a typical case of American blind justice and there wasn't nothing he could do about it, and the judge wasn't going to look at the twenty-seven eight-by-ten color glossy pictures with the circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was to be used as evidence against us, and we was fined $50 and had to pick up the garbage in the snow, but that's not what I came to tell you about.

Came to talk about the draft.

They got a building down in New York City
It's called Whitehall Street
Where you walk in, you get injected, inspected, detected, infected, neglected and selected.

I went down to get my physical examination one day and I walked in, I sat down, got good and drunk the night before so I looked and felt my best when I went in that morning, cause I wanted to look like the All-American Kid from New York City, man I wanted, I wanted to feel like the all, I wanted to be the All-American Kid from New York, and I walked in, sat down, I was hung down, brung down, hung up, and all kinds of mean, nasty ugly things, and I walked in and sat down and they gave me a piece of paper, said "Kid, see the psychiatrist, room 604."

And I went up there. I said
Shrink, I want to kill.
I mean, I wanna, I wanna kill.
Kill.
I wanna, I wanna, see, I wanna see blood and gore and guts and veins in my teeth.
Eat dead burnt bodies
I mean kill...
Kill...
KILL?!
KILL!!

And I started jumpin up and down yelling "KILL!! KILL!!" and he started jumpin up and down with me and we was both jumpin up and down yelling "KILL!! KILL!!" And the sergeant came over, pinned a medal on me, sent me down the hall, said "You're our boy."

Didn't feel too good about it...

Proceeded on down the hall gettin' more injections, inspections, detections, neglections and all kinds of stuff that they was doin to me at the thing there, and I was there for two hours, three hours, four hours, I was there for a long time going through all kinds of mean, nasty, ugly things, and I was just having a tough time there, and they was inspecting, injecting every single part of me, and they was leaving no part untouched.

Proceeded through, and when I finally came to see the last man, I walked in, walked in, sat down after a whole big thing there, and I walked up and said "What do you want?"

He said "Kid, we only got one question:
Have you ever been arrested?"

And I proceeded to tell him the story of the Alice's Restaurant Massa-cree, with full orchestration and five-part harmony and stuff like that and all the phenome--

And he stopped me right there and said "Kid,
Did you ever go to court?"

And I proceeded to tell him the story of the twenty-seven eight-by-ten color glossy pictures with the circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one, and he stopped me right there and said

"Kid, I want you to go and sit down on that bench that says Group W...
NOW, Kid!"

And I, I walked over to the, to the bench there, and there is -- Group W's where they put you if you may not be moral enough to join the army after committing your special crime, and there was all kinds of mean, nasty, ugly looking people on the bench there.

Mother rapers.
Father stabbers.
Father rapers.
Father rapers sitting right there on the bench next to me!

And they was mean and nasty and ugly and horrible crime-type guys sitting there on the bench. And the meanest, ugliest, nastiest one, the meanest father raper of them all, was coming over to me and he was mean an' ugly an 'nasty an' horrible and all kinds of things and he sat down next to me and said "Kid, whad'ya get?"

I said "I didn't get nothin, I had to pay $50 and pick up the garbage."

He said "What were you arrested for, kid?"

And I said "Littering."

And they all moved away from me on the bench there, and the hairy eyeball and all kinds of mean nasty things, til I said "...and creatin a nuisance."

And they all came back, shook my hand, and we had a great time on the bench, talkin about crime, mother stabbing, father raping, all kinds of groovy things that we was talking about on the bench, and everything was fine, we was smokin cigarettes and all kinds of things, until the Sergeant came over, had some paper in his hand, held it up and said:

KIDS-THIS-PIECE-OF-PAPER'S-GOT-47-WORDS-37-SENTENCES-58-WORDS-WE-WANNA-KNOW-DETAILS-OF-THE-CRIME-TIME-OF-THE-CRIME-AND-ANY-OTHER-KIND-OF-THING-YOU-GOTTA-SAY-PERTAINING-TO-AND-ABOUT-THE-CRIME-I-WANNA-KNOW-ARRESTING-OFFICER'S-NAME-AND-ANY-OTHER-KIND-OF-THING-THAT-YOU-GOTTA-SAY

and talked for forty-five minutes and nobody understood a word that he said, but we had fun filling out the forms and playing with the pencils on the bench there, and I filled out the massa-cree with the four part harmony, and wrote it down there, just like it was, and everything was fine and I put down the pencil and I turned over the piece of paper, and there

there on the other side

in the middle of the other side

away from everything else on the other side

in parentheses

capital letters

quotated

read the following words:

("KID, HAVE YOU REHABILITATED YOURSELF?")

I went over to the Sergeant, said "Sergeant, you gotta lotta damn gall to ask me if I've rehabilitated myself, I mean, I mean, I mean that just, I'm sittin' here on the bench, I mean I'm sittin' here on the Group W Bench cause you want to know if I'm moral enough to join the army, burn women, kids, houses and villages, after bein' a litterbug."

He looked at me and said "Kid, we don't like your kind, and we're gonna send your fingerprints off to Washington."

And friends, somewhere in Washington, enshrined in some little folder, is a study in black and white of my fingerprints. And the only reason I'm singing you this song now is cause you may know somebody in a similar situation, or you may be in a similar situation, and if you're in a situation like that there's only one thing you can do and that's walk into the shrink wherever you are, just walk in,

say "Shrink:
You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant."
and walk out...

You know, if one person
Just one person does it, they may think he's really sick and they won't take him.

And if two people,
Two people do it
(in harmony)
they may think they're both faggots and they won't take either of them.

And if three people do it...

Three, can you imagine, three people walking in, singin' a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out? They may think it's an organization.

And can you -- can you imagine fifty people a day?
I said fifty people a day, walkin in, singin' a bar of Alice's Restaurant and walking out, and friends, they may think it's a movement.

And that's what it is, the Alice's Restaurant Anti-Massa-cree Movement, and all you gotta do to join is sing it the next time it comes around on the gui-tar.

With feeling.

So we'll wait for it to come around on the gui-tar here and sing it when it does. Here it comes:

You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant
You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant
Walk right in, it's around the back
Just a half a mile from the railroad track
And you can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant

That was horrible. If you want to end war and stuff you got to sing loud. I've been singing this song now for twenty-five minutes. I could sing it for another twenty-five minutes.

I'm not proud...
or tired.

So we'll wait til it comes around again, and this time with four part harmony.
And feeling.

We're just waitin for it to come around is what we're doing. All right now:

You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant (exceptin' Alice)
You can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant
Walk right in, it's around the back
Just a half a mile from the railroad track
And you can get anything you want at Alice's Restaurant

La da da da da da dum, at Alice's Restaurant!

- Arlo Guthrie

Sometimes you have to make your own story, sometimes you have to shoot the storyteller in the neck

2012-11-17T13:22:47Z

Sonya and I caught SpeakEasy's production of BLOODY BLOODY ANDREW JACKSON on Wednesday night. I also caught it during its brief Broadway run in 2010 and both times was as thoroughly entertained as one can be with a musical which raises an interesting question: "What if Andrew Jackson, our seventh President, was a young emo rock star?" (Asked by the show's creators, one day, over coffee. Things don't get any higher concept than that.)

They've got a point, a very good one: Jackson was a political rock star, the first President who wasn't made by the caucus-loving political elite, a populist whose followers created a new political party for him and then trashed the White House during Jackson's open-to-the-public inaugural ball (a scene not included in the musical, but its spirit is definitely there.) And emo? He was definitely emo. He came from Circumstances which one would call Pretty Bad. His father died three weeks before he was born, his two brothers died during the American Revolution, and his mother died of cholera when he was fourteen. That's pretty much the perfect age for our musical Jackson to declare in song "Life sucks, and my life sucks in particular."(1) Jackson grew up hardened in battle, many battles really, and practiced ritual bloodletting with his wife. The dude was a cutter. I don't even know why I'm still pressing this point.

This, then, leads us to a very youthful musical about a youthful country performed by Kids These Days. I'm trying not to be dismissive here, I'm really not, but upon leaving the theater in 2010 I remarked "I think I know how thirty-somethings in 1968 felt when they saw Hair."(2) This youth culture is not mine; my youth culture was not this. This is the culture of bros, hipsters, fauxhawks and duckfaces. I am okay with this. The show requires brash, invincible twenty-somethings to put over the portrayal of a brash, invincible early 19th century country. When they collectively sing about taking the land "back" from the British, Spanish and natives, they need to believe, however naively, that they are "pretty sure it's our land, anyway." The musical is loud, angry, energetic, and in places sexypants as befits its slogan. In one of many wonderful anachronistic moves, our stage version of Andrew Jackson does not age beyond, say, twenty-three.

It's all a mish-mosh of period and contemporary, never trying to maintain one century over the other. Waistcoats, watch fobs and neck ruffs mix chaotically with t-shirts, tight jeans and eyeliner on everyone. Benjamin Walker, who originated the role of Andrew Jackson all the way from the show's first workshopping to West Coast tryouts to off-Broadway to Broadway, had the Billie Joe Armstrong look down pat. The score echoes Green Day in parts, but it also echoes Kander & Ebb: the backroom "Corrupt Bargain" which gave the 1824 election to John Quincy Adams when Jackson had won the popular vote is presented in a doodle-doo doodle-doo number which would have fit quite easily in Chicago. The next number goes right back to Green Day.

It's madness. There is no fourth wall; a contemporary narrator is shot in the neck before Jackson even takes office, which as Sonya pointed out to me, beats Assassins' record of early narrator removal. A song entitled "Illness as Metaphor" begins by refuting Susan Sontag but ends when it realizes "her cancer wasn't metaphorical at all... sorry." The Washington elite are preening runway queens. Henry Clay wears a weasel ascot with weasel head attached. Jackson has a Wii in his Oval Office and receives tour groups from Tennessee wearing orange "GO VOLS" shirts. James Monroe shows up in one of the show's final scenes, as Jackson receives an honorary doctorate from Harvard, and defiantly stays after another cast member informs him that he's dead by this point. Anachronisms, schmanachronisms, the musical just doesn't give a fuck and that's what makes it work.

Mostly.

At its best, Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson is a historical pageant gone horribly awry, a Schoolhouse Punk lesson in populism (yea, yea!) and a successful experiment in art direction. It could very well have been a half-assed revue featuring a bunch of hipsters singing historical stuff ironically and self-referentially for laughs, but it has faith in its non-fuck-giving convictions. The parallels run both ways. Jackson's line "Presidents don't need to ask permission" accurately points fingers at modern-day politicians, and a song near the end of the show asks if Jackson's immediate Manifest Destiny legacy was worth it for "the swimming pools, the highways, the ballgames in the dusk". (3)

But the show falls apart entirely in the last third when we reach a certain point in Jackson's presidency. The immature, Wii-playing cabinet (and Oval Office cheerleaders who make out with each other to entertain the tourists) are fine as Jackson dissolves the National Bank and tells the Senate to go suck his dick when they subsequently censure him. Those Senate guys are a bunch of douchebags, anyway. The attitude still works when Jackson painfully realizes that the people don't really want to dictate all that boring political policy themselves; they want their duly-elected leader to dictate it for them. Not even the band wants to pitch in and help him run the country.

But all this energy, all this rock star madness, all these anachronistic shenanigans which work wonderfully for Jackson's populist rise can not and do not work when it comes to the issue of his forced relocation of Native American tribes, the ethnic cleansing to make way for Manifest Destiny. The show opens with Jackson announcing "Here's the thing about the Indians", but much like admitting Sontag was right, it realizes it cannot address the heavier issues with such a light tone. It has to give a fuck here.

So it does, and everything stops cold. To its credit, the production doesn't shy away from the problem. Instead, it tackles it head-on as best as it can. The narrator comes back (with a halo and a harp) to tell Jackson that people are still divided on his legacy. Yes, he acquired more land for the U.S. than Jefferson's Louisiana Purchase, but at what cost? The angel narrator informs us that some consider Andrew Jackson "an American Hitler", and when Jackson wonders why history hasn't vindicated him, she responds "You don't shoot history in the neck!" If there is any time for Jackson to "grow up"(4) and admit responsibility it is now, but even though the show spends the majority of its running time celebrating the man, it does not give him an opportunity for posthumous apology and redemption. That's a form of revisionism which it will not attempt. I agree with this move.

The show ends with Jackson pondering all of this downstage in harsh white light, a sharp contrast to the predominantly red lighting scheme of the rock show. The cast stands upstage, holding up photorealistic masks of Native Americans, a sharp contrast to the plastic feather war bonnets and suction cup arrows in the first half. Lights out. Audience sits in silence. All the sexypants energy, so eagerly generated at the start, has been sucked out of the room. The upbeat curtain call rings false.

I should like to think it's not the fault of the show that it falls apart like this, but Andrew Jackson's. After all, he was the guy who did it. The show went through enough revisions and workshops that it's clear the ending was the best out of several attempts, so I suppose this is the best we get. I can make peace with that. The first two-thirds of the show are an absolute blast and the reason why I wanted to go see it again.

I was very glad to see the show another time thanks to SpeakEasy, but much preferred the cast I saw in New York City. SpeakEasy's Andrew Jackson was not played with as much strength, swagger, anger and power that Benjamin Walker brought to the role; instead, he took the petulant emo route, often coming off whinier than Jackson should be. He still had one hell of a presence, but at times I felt like he was channeling Doug from The State.

However, I suspect Boston probably had an influence on the sexypants swagger or lack thereof. In New York, Walker made his entrance in his tight black jeans and announced "I'm Andrew Jackson, and I'm gonna fuck each and every one of you tonight" and the crowd, younger than I, howled. Jackson did not make this promise in Boston. I was possibly on the younger side of the median age in that Wednesday night Brahmin audience, which may not have enjoyed hearing it. You can't give the nice old rich people heart attacks before the opening number. (They didn't get a lot of the jokes, either, and I think Sonya and I had to start the applause after at least one song. So it goes.)

The ensemble, all but two of whom were new to SpeakEasy, did a good job; Sonya was impressed by the singer who did, in her words, "the best Amanda Palmer impression I've ever seen from anyone who still had her own eyebrows". But as well as they worked together, I felt the energy was off. They were not acting all Rock Star. Jackson should act all Rock Star and he does, but the ensemble needs to as well to keep that energy up. The direction seemed to treat the rock musical more like a musical and less like a rock show, which is not how they did it in New York. It was rock show all the way over there. I am slightly vindicated upon hearing the original cast recording.

Perhaps it was just a mid-week lull. Perhaps it was because the arrangements weren't as loud and electric this time around. There was a lot more piano and less fuzzy, stomped-on electric guitar. But these are quibbles; I have no regrets. The show still had a lot of energy, the material which worked was as good as I remembered, and it was a damn good evening out for twenty-five bucks. We even got an occasional horn section this time around, which gave the curtain call number, a version of the folk song "The Hunters of Kentucky", a pretty great ska sound.

Oddly enough, the New York version of "Hunters" was all guitar and bass drum and a voice which made the song sound an awful lot like something the self-proclaimed "Celtic thrash" band Cordelia's Dad would have performed. In the mid-90s. Oh, hey, there's my youth culture. I wondered where we left it.

1. For the sake of narrative simplicity, Jackson's family and hometown die en masse after the opening number, but hey.

2. I did not feel the same way when I left the theater in 2012, but that was mostly because this time around I wasn't one of the oldest people in the audience.

3. The Broadway show hung John Gast's American Progress upstage left and lit it appropriately during this number; SpeakEasy's less ostentatious setting did not feature the painting at all, which I thought was a small shame.

4. Jackson was actually sixty-one when he assumed the office of President in 1828, but again, hey.

DOCTOR WHO AND THE ESCAPE CLUB TO ROCK IT SO RIGHT, SAAAY

2012-09-19T10:30:07Z

Dear god there's a new LJ editor window thingy and since it doesn't look like the one that I've been using for nearly the past ten years, I HATE IT. I hope LJ doesn't pull a Google and end up forcing me to use the old one because well THAT'S JUST MEAN. IN ALL CAPS.

Well look what snuck up on us while we weren't looking: ~~A new QI series~~ ~~A new cartoon called Gravity Falls~~ New Doctor Who! I think this series has been one of the most hyped up in a while because of The Thing What Happens In Episode Five, which we shall not discuss here since A. while we know more or less what happens we don't yet know how, and B. if you do know how and explain it all, we will send this fine twenty-pound cat over to your house so he can pee all over your floor, Clarissa.

So here we are already at the third episode. The season opener, "Asylum of the Daleks", was pretty damn good as far as I was concerned. It had Daleks but not Daleks straight out of the Apple store dancing to stupid music or anything, it had proper menacing Daleks and insane Daleks and, at the very end, rightly confused Daleks. (The chanting may have been a bit much. I thought Moffat had already gotten that particular question out of his system with the previous finale.)

We were also treated to our first glimpse of Oswin The New Companion-To-Be. It may be too soon for the Internet to judge^[1] whether SHE'S REALLY AWESOME and/or BRING ON THE RULE 34^[2] and/or SHE STINKS BRING BACK KAMELION, but I thought Oswin made a good first impression. She's like Ace with Sarah Jane's inquisitive mad skills crossed with Ace with Peri's fun-to-say name and spirited attitude (the better parts of it, anyway; Perpugilliam could be as annoying as Mel at times) crossed with Ace. She also seems to have stolen Christina Ricci's hair, but I don't know if Ricci is canon or not so let's give Oswin a pass for now.

Considering Oswin's departure in "Asylum of the Daleks", exactly how she's gonna pop back into the Doctor's life and/or timestream in the Christmas Special will make a dandy point of conjecture after The Thing What Happens In Episode Five. I have no qualms about her age; she seems to have handled the matter of age nearly as well as Matt Smith did when he first came aboard. Remember, when everybody was worried the kid would step out of the TARDIS in short pants and stuff? Yeah, well. Consider that if Zooey here ends up retaining any part at all of the Dalek she'd been stuffed into, she will become the most fascinating companion in the entire series. I mean, a Dalek is the last thing you'd expect the Doctor would allow in the TARDIS to get its greasy suction-cup mitt marks all over the console. Unless Big Finish or the comics did something with like K-9 being turned into a Dalek or something, I don't know, I hope they didn't, and now I've written Dalek so many times it's lost syntactical context.

Then we had "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship", the most accurately-named episode so far. It had dinosaurs! On a spaceship! The Doctor even says this in case we hadn't figured it out! It did what it said in the TV listings and was a darn good adventure besides. Rory's father, Arthur Brian Weasley Williams, was a wonderful character. His "Why thank you, Arthur C. Clarke!" rant was terrific, and his goggle-eyed, trembling reaction to an affectionate Triceratops was nearly a cartoon take. Brian's nicest moment, though, involved him watching the Earth from orbit, feet dangling from the TARDIS, happily having a meal just like Wilf on his hilltop. It was sweet and majestic and just what you would do, too, once you put faith in TARDIS magic to keep you from asphyxiating. And seated.

The concept of the Doctor's ad hoc gang, cobbled together to fill the Amy and Rory-shaped hole in his hearts (they were "taking a break" from having adventures with the Doctor when he suddenly swooped in and took 'em to the aforementioned spaceship with dinosaurs) was great. The two characters were colorful and enjoyable, even if it was pretty obvious that Nefertiti was going to end up with Jurassic Park Guy the moment they started arguing. But still! High concept, people! Mysteriously-disappearing Egyptian queen and Rupert Graves as a big-game hunter, both running around with the Doctor! It can't go all that bad! The only shame is that the characters were written as if they knew they'd only be in for one episode. We were given everything we needed from them. No more, no less. Can't have 'em back too soon. That'd just risk overkill and we've never had any of that in our science-fiction.

I also really liked the fact that the Earth agency governing space in the story's timeline was Indian. Not a racially diverse group with one or two Indian officers with one or two lines of dialogue, but a whole-cut representation of India and her space program. Big ups to the BBC for reminding us, especially those of us over here in the Walled Garden-States of America, that there's plenty of nations on Earth with space interests. I mean, the group could just as easily have been an American one, all Battlestar Galactica-like by the way they were waving their nukes around, but we were spared that particular ignominy for this week.

After watching the teaser for "A Town Called Mercy", I was struck with two thoughts: One, Toby Whithouse sure loves himself some The Jam^[3]; and Two, as with any Doctor Who episode set in America, it would either turn out incredibly awesome like "The Impossible Astronaut" or it would be insufferably terrible, like "The Daleks Take Manhattan" or whatever the hell it was called. There's no middle ground.

Anyway, we got Manhattan.

It's a shame, too, because I could see where they really really really wanted to go with this. Continuing the string of high-concept episodes, we go from Dalek insane asylum to dinosaurs on a spaceship to The Doctor in his very own real live Western movie. It was even shot in Spain to give it that authentic Leone/Morricone flavor. Well now, you say, that should be awesome! The Doctor would totally be like all Doc Brown in Back To The Future III only less manic since he's not Tennant, there'd be a showdown at High Noon, and he'd take care of the bad guys without being a gunslinger. He'd totally fake 'em out at the gunfight and do something cool with his sonic screwdriver, yeah.

But by the time we got to the showdown at High Noon which indeed goes down as expected, the episode had worn out the Western genre by featuring nearly every Western film cliche you can think of, trotting them all out like a K-Tel compilation.

D-WHO PRESENTS WILD WEST TOWN! 20 ORIGINAL CLICHES FROM 20 ORIGINAL CLICHED WESTERN SCENES! THERE'S

THE TOWN SIGN WITH HASTILY-SCRAWLED POPULATION CORRECTION!
IGNERNT TOWNSFOLK A-SKEERD OF NEWCOMERS!
A DRAMATIC MUSIC-STOPPING SALOON ENTRANCE!
UNDERTAKER MEASURING A DOOMED MAN!
CHARMING WAIF IN GINGHAM DRESS!
EQUIVOCATIN' PREACHER MAN!
NOBLE SHERIFF-TYPE WHO BUYS IT AT THE END OF ACT TWO!

BUT WAIT! YOU ALSO GET BAD FRONTIER GRAMMAR, SHOWDOWN AT HIGH NOON WITH BETWEEN-THE-LEGS SHOTS, AND RANDOM ~~PROSTITUTE~~ DANCE HALL GIRL WITH A HEART OF GOLD! CALL NOW!

The first ten minutes alone contained more situations than Bugs Bunny could hope to lampoon in one shot. So perhaps the Doctor has indeed fallen into a Western film, and I wish we could treat it like the B-picture it would be, because that would be fun. But "A Town Called Mercy" does something else, and it goes beyond Western cliches and slipping American accents. It fundamentally messes with the Doctor's character for one crucial moment and then, perhaps worse, writes it off completely.

Okay. So we've got a fugitive human-looking alien who has holed up in this Western town acting as their doctor (get it?) He's stalked by a Yul Brynner-alike, one cyborg assassin with powers of teleportation and a laser Gatling gun permanently attached to his arm. Our fugitive is the one who attached that gun; he's on the lam after committing atrocious crimes against his species, including turning ostensibly nice people into robotic killing machines. And you know what, after watching the entire Battlestar Galactica run this summer^[4], I can safely say that when you start making robotic killing machines, your creations will eventually turn on you with a goddamn vengeance.

But our cyborg has been programmed with, or his human side has retained, some semblance of morality. He refuses to harm innocent people; he only wants to take the Fugitive. He's hunted down the other doctors the Fugitive had worked with and this one is the last. It's a fact that the cold opening tries to turn into a source of "OOOH I BET HE MEANS THE DOCTOR, OUR DOCTOR, OH NOS" tension, only to lamely discard it a scene or two later when we meet said Fugitive. I sense a theme of lamely discarding things here.

The cyborg's morality extends to his approach when the townspeople refuse to hand the Fugitive over, suddenly very accepting of their newcomer friend in spite of his weird green scar-like facial marking and not-so-stellar past. I think that's mostly because the Fugitive brought them the gift of Electric Light a few decades early and cured all their authentic frontier diseases, but also because he didn't quite tell them the whole truth.

The cyborg decides to wait it out. He encircles the town with a line of rocks, turning it into some weird kind of Western fairy circle, and lets nobody in or out. Apparently Mercy is so far away from civilization that passers-by haven't noticed the blockade and gone off to warn the Federales, or whatever, but maybe they explained that a little in the beginning while I was still reeling from the cliches. From what I saw, however, it appears that hole-in-the-hat warning shots do the trick just fine. Regardless, the fact remains that a line has been built in the sand and there it will stay until the Fugitive is dead, dead, dead.

Once the Doctor learns of the Fugitive's past, however, he goes bazonkers. Fugitive, who is also apparently an accomplished psychotherapist, suggests that the Doctor is furious at the Fugitive's casual attitude towards messing with species because he's furious with his own messing with species. It's a valid fact; the Doctor has indeed done some horrible things in his time including at least one count of genocide^[5].

Furious, the Doctor marches the Fugitive up to the line of rocks and prepares to toss him over for the cyborg. This could be the setup for a good old-fashioned Doctor fake-out, but it's not. To make matters worse, he even holds a gun on the Fugitive and makes it clear in no uncertain terms that he's willing to shoot this no-good varmint himself. It's up to Amy and Rory (they're in this episode, too) to convince the Doctor that mmmmaybe violence isn't the solution here, and after a bit of soul-wrasslin, he relents.

Hogwash. The Doctor is like Batman. He does not kill with guns. It's one thing to shoot out the lights and make your escape, or shoot the chandelier rope and send the lights crashing down on the bad guys; it's another thing entirely to consciously decide to blow some alien Mengele's head off. Even if the guy is an alien Mengele. It's not fair to the character and it does not make sense. It certainly doesn't make sense when, a scene or two later, the Doctor himself convinces an angry lynch mob (minus the torchwoods and pitchforks) that mmmmaybe violence isn't the solution here. I don't care if this was done to reinforce that he's learned his lesson and is sticking to it. That there's a mood swing even Ten wouldn't have taken.

Hell, considering the lynch mob happens so soon after the townsfolk are more than willing to protect their doctor (something about the cyborg finally announcing he'd kill them all if they didn't bring the dude out by High Noon), people's opinions and loyalties shift a lot more in this episode than they should have.

The story could have easily done something else than have the Doctor flip the hell out and do the whole "nobody move or the geneticist gets it" routine. Crammed some more cliches in, perhaps. We didn't get any authentic frontier gibberish, the dance girl with the heart of gold didn't do the Can-Can, nobody went that-a-way, and neither was anybody cut off at the pass. Any of these things could have filled the few minutes when the Doctor's character took a quick break. I would have preferred the Can-Can with authentic frontier gibberish. That way, when the Doctor does his non-violence speech, and later, when he has the aforementioned Showdown at High Noon and pulls his sonic screwdriver instead of a gun, it wouldn't seem so gosh-darned rassinfrassin hornswogglin sidewinderish. It also would have been a hell of a lot more sincere.

And then we have the Nobly Dying Sheriff, called Marshal in these here parts on accountin' that "Sheriff" was just a little too much. The Marshal exists mostly to give much-needed exposition at the start, keep peace and order until the town accepts the Doctor as a good guy, and then--lying on the ground, breathing his last^[6]--pass his shiny golden star badge to the Doctor after getting in between the Fugitive and a laser Gatling gun blast. His sacrifice is empty as hell, since the Fugitive blows himself up a little while later after realizing yeah, maybe he ought to atone for his sins after all. I guess he figures he's done enough to help the town, including giving them the electric light. That wouldn't mess with any timeline stuff, no siree.

The Fugitive does get a lovely moment of world-building before he goes boom, however, when he explains that His People's beliefs in the afterlife involve a large mountain which you must climb to your eternal reward. You do so weighed down by the souls of everybody you wronged in your life. This promise of guilt and impending atonement apparently didn't stop him from doing the whole war-cyborg thing, but it creeps back in at the end when necessary. I liked the concept nevertheless. It could very easily spring from any faith-based culture, and was probably put in the story by somebody else.

I think that's all I can write about this episode. I am tired. It was made with the best of intentions, but someone let the irrational loose and it took over. A pity since the sets were lookin' good, the mountains around them even better, and the bombastic score had a reason this week to be bombastic. Yet, as they said after the first unsuccessful guillotine test, it was a great idea but bad execution.

NEXT WEEK: Amy and Rory have a Crisis. There is havoc. I am leery.

1. Ha ha ha, like it's ever been too soon for the Internet to judge! Hee hee hoo!

2. Ha ha ha, like the Internet isn't already on it! Hee hee oh god damn

3. I know that sentence looks weird but the fact of the matter is that The Jam is, was, and always will be The Jam, and not Jam when it's convenient.

4. Oy vey.

5. Ten wipes out the Racnoss in the Christmas special The Runaway Bride by more or less drowning them in the Thames. Happy birthday, Jesus!

6. Looks like the undertaker was measuring the wrong guy all along. To quote Gravity Falls' own Mabel Pines, WOMP WOMP.

This is some Minecraft.

2012-07-20T09:57:46Z

This is a bit. Or a switch. Whatever you like.

This is a bit when it's on.

If you're really clever, you can chain them together.

And then you can count to seven.

Okay, bye.

Ed note: Enough boldface there, Standwick?

2012-07-12T20:00:41Z

Every now and then, since we owe him a favor or two, this journal thingo will feature the writings of Standwick Mushmeyer. Mr. Mushmeyer is a columnist at the Slimy Falls Times-Shopper, the only newspaper covering that corner of the tri-county area. We are assured by Mr. Mushmeyer that while he describes himself as "generally dissatisfied with just about everything", his local slice-of-life ponderings aim to entertain as well as enlighten. So without further ado, here is his latest column.

Vox Standwicki
By Standwick Mushmeyer
Wednesday, July 12, 2012

Greetings, fellow Times-Shoppers. If you turned to this page expecting Gladys Hazelton's gardening column, and it's a mystery to me why anyone would, I am afraid your expectations are now ruined. Our two columns have switched places. This now means, as you have just discovered, that your humble columnist's weekly ponderings are now to be found right here in the back of Living, just after the Novenas to St. Jude, and "Growing with Gladys" has moved up to Op/Ed. Far be it from me to question the infinite wisdom of the Times-Shopper editorial staff, but if you sincerely want to know Mrs. Hazelton's "opinions" on potting soil and junk from which to make planters, you'll need to go back.

This is the third week that I have had to explain this change. I do not know how I can make it any clearer. Please stop sending me letters. Gladys is on Page 5; go find her there.

Speaking of time elapsing, here we are in July of 2012 and that pothole on East Sycamore still has not been filled in. If anything, I think it's grown since I first reported on its car-jostling effects in March. Exactly how large must this asphalt hole become in order to be noticed? Large enough for a car carrying a baby to fall in? You'd better sit down for the answer, because it is most likely yes. I've gone through some scenarios in my head and the baby-carrying car is the worst because it's the most embarrassing. While the infant would undoubtedly suffer no injury, the incident would make Channel 8 News, the networks would pick up on it, and before you know it, we'd be known as the City with the Baby in a Pothole. This simply will not do. We all know how long it took to shake off the reputation after the mishap with the carillon at Closkey Park.

So where, I ask you, is the Department of Public Works? I can only conclude that they are working on a top-secret project somewhere in another town. This project must be so important to the tri-county area that all other works have been temporarily put on hold. It is the only way to explain the continued existence of not just the pothole, but the broken walk signal button at the corner of Beecher and Dwight and the misspelled signs on Harrison. (Gentlemen, the correct spelling is "SCHOOL ZONE" and I have never been more embarrassed by proxy of a civic department in all my life.)

A wise man once said "If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself." Well, I don't want it done right, I just want it done, so this is where you, dear readers, come in. If you really want to show the DPW a thing or two and you have a shovel, a wheelbarrow and/or some macadam, kindly bring them on down to East Sycamore next Saturday or any time you like, really. I'm not picky. The pothole's located just a little bit before the dump after the corner with the roadside memorial on the left side.

And on a lighter note, sure looks like the Burger Whizzard in the mall is closing. I can't say I'll miss it since I haven't been since the summer of 1996. I can say, however, that it seems karma has finally caught up with the restaurant which refused to serve breakfast even if it was clearly 10:28. Godspeed, Burger Whizzard, and may your replacement be one which serves pop in a small size. Your "medium and large only" nonsense only added to my suspicions.

Confidential to "J. Doe": What in creation is a blog and why should I acquire one for myself?

oh valve no you dint

2012-07-12T06:38:50Z

Hello, Source Filmmaker.

Goodbye, free time.

Because nobody asked for it

2012-07-07T10:56:29Z

THE WORST EPISODES OF DEEP SPACE 9 ACCORDING TO THE INTERNET
As determined by searching for "worst episodes DS9" and applying math to the findings
Presented in order from Sucky to Suckiest, with commentary, by somebody who needs sleep

10. "VALIANT"
Otherwise known as The One Where There Was A Ship Full Of Cadets. Earns ire for, and inspires fear of, a ship commanded by YA clones of Wesley Crusher and Marissa Picard, Stephen Ratliff's legendary Mary Sue. The episode earns points in my book for realizing halfway through that perhaps this idea wasn't so hot in the first place so let's not have a spin-off, thank you very much.

9. "IF WISHES WERE HORSES"
Otherwise known as The One With Rumplestiltskin Yes Really Go Look It Up No I Don't Know What They Were Thinking Either. First season episode where the holosuites go crazy due to $SCIENCE and start pumping out versions of people's dreams. There were a lot of stinkers in the first season, and this was one of them. ~~Little~~ Wee Molly O'Brien dreams up fairy tales to drive her dad crazy and Dr. Bashir, who was still being written as an obnoxious horndog, dreams up a Dax who is, like, so totally into him it's embarrassing. Viewer goes all Joan Rivers and does the finger-down-the-throat-aghk-aghk-aghk thing. Repeatedly.

8. "Q-LESS"
Otherwise known as The One With Q, because... it's the one with Q. They had to have him on at some point, so they did it as quickly as possible in the first season to get ratings. See above in re: first season stinkers. I actually like the ending of this one, if only because Q has a nifty little revelation: It takes the perspective of one of those silly mortals to make him realize that all the things he's seen and done are TOTALLY AWESOME because he's Q. He snaps out of the episode slightly less blase, and that's fine by me.

7. "MERIDIAN"
Otherwise known as The One Where Dax Goes Into An Alternate Dimension And Falls In Love. I didn't hate this one and honestly don't have much to snark about, but the Internet sure detested it enough.

6. "FASCINATION"
Otherwise known as The One Where Lwaxana Troi Shows Up And Makes Everybody Fall In Love. I admit I have a soft spot for Lwaxana because when she shows up, it's simply to troll the heck out of the episode. Who else can drive Picard crazy? Oh, that Lwaxana. She has a problem, though: if the episode she's in stinks, she's usually written as completely obnoxious. When the episode isn't so bad, like the one in which she gets stuck in a turbolift with Odo (and let that fact sink in: "Fascination" is worse than a stuck-in-an-elevator episode) she drops the obnoxious caricature and turns out all right. In the turbolift episode she's maternally kind to Odo and I like that relationship. In "Fascination", however, all Lwaxana does is go nuts with the innuendo.

5. "LET HE WHO IS WITHOUT SIN"
Otherwise known as The One Where They All Go To Risa And Worf Becomes A Total Downer. The general consensus of the Internet is that this episode stinks because A. it's all about sex but had to be toned down to the point where backrubs are scandalous and B. Worf is a big stinky party pooper with more issues than the New Yorker. While everybody else is swappin' backrubs, Worf turns prickly and joins up with a group of similar malcontents with a plan, obstensibly thought up by a Batman villain, to ruin Risa by controlling the weather. They attempt to make it rain all the time, because as we all know you can't give backrubs while it rains. Worf's a wet blanket through and through, but going in with these jerks is a bit too much, even for Mr. Grumpyface.

4. "THE STORYTELLER"
Otherwise known as The One Where If We Believe Really Hard, Boys And Girls, We Can Make That Monster Go Away. Bashir and O'Brien visit Gullible Town, a backwater Bajoran village where the inhabitants are periodically menaced by a big evil cloud and to drive it off, a spiritual storyteller leads them in what amounts to a collective Care Bear Stare. The Internet doesn't like this episode mostly because these are some of the first native Bajorans we meet in the series and, well, they turn out to be as dumb as rocks and ready to believe anything as long as it's said by some guy standing on those rocks. Not the best introduction but fortunately this characterization of Bajorans was quickly forgotten. In place of the yokels we instead got the likes of Vedek Bareil and Louise Fletcher's Kai Winn, whose character easily ties Gul Dukat for Best DS9 Villain.

3. "PROFIT AND LACE"
Otherwise known as The One Where Misogynistic Quark Becomes A Fe-male And Learns Valuable Lessons Which Won't Be Retained Into Next Week. Even us smart, discerning science-fiction fans who like the Ferengi episodes ("The Magnificent Ferengi" is absolutely brilliant) can't stand this one. It's another frustrating exercise in Ferengi misogyny which begins with Quark sexually harrassing a Dabo girl and ends with Quark having a change of heart about all fe-males everywhere. I believe this episode inspires his fourth or fifth. Wallace Shawn also doesn't bother to help as the screechy Grand Nagus Zek. It's clear he's having the time of his life playing a Ferengi, but man oh man he's irritating.

2. "THE MUSE"
Otherwise known as The One Where Jake Sisko Gets Seduced By A Creepy Creative Vampire. Oh, look, Jake is being a struggling writer. Oh, look, a mysterious woman from out of nowhere gives him a magic pen and inspires him. Oh, don't look, it's unsettling watching her "inspire" him. Oh, look, his writing's not that great but now it's supposed to be terrific. Oh, look, she's dangerous. Oh, look, Jake's out cold in the infirmary. Meanwhile, Lwaxana and Odo get married. (Long story, but better than the one Jake's writing.)

1. "MOVE ALONG HOME"
Otherwise known as ALLAMARAINE, COUNT TO FOUR, ALLAMARAINE, THEN THREE MORE. Another ludicrous first season episode where the gang gets sucked into a living board game thanks to $ALIEN_OF_THE_WEEK, and have to play their way out by solving puzzles, playing hopscotch, and not choking to death on poison gas. At the end it's revealed that they weren't really in any kind of mortal danger, so the life-or-death struggle which was so cool in the malevolent board game resignedly flops to the ground and stops speaking to anyone. I liked the concept of the game, however, and think Sisko and Kira grudgingly doing the Allamaraine Dance is absolutely hilarious. Otherwise, pbbbththth. The "Worst Of" lists I found differed wildly in some cases, but this episode was the one everybody agreed on.

HONORABLE MENTIONS

* THE ONE WHERE KIRA MEETS SEXY EVIL MIRROR UNIVERSE KIRA
* THE ONE WHERE BASHIR FALLS IN LOVE WITH THE STUBBORN WOMAN IN THE WHEELCHAIR
* THE ONE WHERE WEE MOLLY O'BRIEN FALLS INTO A TIME VORTEX AND COMES OUT ALL L'ENFANT SAUVAGE AND STUFF

NOT ON THIS LIST BECAUSE NOBODY REALLY LISTED IT AND BECAUSE IT'S AWESOME
* THE ONE WITH THE BASEBALL GAME

"This is an outrage!" "This is an inrage!"

2012-06-25T10:36:36Z

Well, now, this is something I didn't know about: When Things Were Rotten, Mel Brooks' 1975 sitcom based on Robin Hood. A proto-Men In Tights. And from what I read in the Wickerpedier, the show's cancellation in the face of decent reviews turned out to be a boon to popular culture because it let two of its stars, Dick Van Patten and Bernie Kopell, free to do Eight Is Enough and The Love Boat. Respectively.

YouTub has the theme song right here and yeah, it's Mel all the way. There's even a Teri Garralike.

Only one episode exists on YouTube (the kids call it The Y.T.) in two parts: A-One and A-Two. The episode is directed by Jerry Paris, who has a sitcom pedigree a mile wide. He played Dr. Jerry Helper on The Dick Van Dyke Show and directed tons of stuff. Go look him up.

And in case you were concerned, and I know you can be so very concerned sometimes, the very first scene is a bunch of crowd response gags. That's our Mel.

I discovered the theme on a 9-minute compilation of intros to one-season wonders from the 1970s. It features Quark, of which I have the series run because you can never have too much Richard Benjamin, but most are mysterious surprises to me. I think that's mostly because these failures didn't quite make for cheap syndication fodder in the 80s, when I would've picked them up from any number of independent UHF stations in the area. Gotta miss those stations. WTXX and WSBK represent.

Among the finds in this compilation there's a 1979 Burrows (James) and Brooks (James L.) sitcom starring Wilfrid Hyde-White and Martin Short whose intro would have fit right in with the Murphy Brown era. There's also Dom DeLuise channeling a little Jackie Gleason in a 1974 times-are-tough sitcom called, and this is where I firmly began to believe that the clip fell from an alternate universe, "Lotsa Luck!"

I do so enjoy combing YouTube for old TV stuff. I'm glad I found this stuff to share because other than that, I've been taking comfort in the fact that in these uncertain times, one can watch a full hour of local candlepin bowling from 1982, commercials included, thanks to some obsessive on the Internet.

Insomnia is a terrible thing.

Minecraft Dark Ride Project: I AM THE DISPATCH MASTER

2012-06-24T16:21:12Z

I've been working steadily on the Jinx dark ride project in Minecraft, leisurely enjoying as is my right as a hobbyist the luxury of re-building, tweaking, and adding things as I see fit. Last night I finished the ride circuit and took the very first full ride. The scenery for the last few scenes aren't in place, one transitional corridor doesn't even have a building around it, and the finale is going to need some tweaking, but this does not detract from the awesome facts, some of which are shown in the video under the cut, that:

1. You can walk through the ride queue, press a button on the loading platform to summon a cart, hop in the cart, press another button to dispatch the cart, ride through the entire ride, arrive at the offload platform, then step off and walk through the exit while the cart is sent backstage to await another summons.

2. With three other carts.

3. In a nifty little dispenser thingo I made.

Yeah, there's also a water stunt.

And a ride-thru viaduct, but I'll post on the scenery stuff later. Once it's actually finished. You know.

I'm most proud of the minecart dispenser. This was the first iteration I mocked up near the Jinx ride buildings to play around with timing, layout and visuals.

The dispenser is a nice little cascading design. Minecarts are parked on downhill-angled booster track, which acts as a brake when left unpowered. The circuitry sends a pulse to each section of booster track, releasing a cart which moves downhill. The pulse is timed so the lowest booster is activated first, allowing one cart to be sent to the loading platform while the others eventually drop in to fill the gaps. The cart on the loading platform will, once dispatched, end up on the booster at the very top.

The trick was to make sure that each booster turns off just before the cart above comes down to it. After some fiddling around with the delay switches, I found that 0.6 seconds was enough time to do it. I've shown my work, but sign text is pretty rotten when viewed from a distance.

The second iteration grew a bit more complex, as I added automation to the design.

In doing so I built my first-ever logic gate in Minecraft. Naturally it needed to be honored.

The control panel may look daunting with its impressive array of buttons, lever and signal light, but the process here is very simple.

Step 1. PRES BUTAN

Step 2. GET KART

Step 3. MAK KART GO.

The two dispatch buttons are another proof-of-concept. #1 is the self-dispatch button, located within reach of the minecart rider. #2 is the operator dispatch button, for control freaks who want to play ride op in multiplayer or something.

The automated BUTAN PRES feature eliminates Step 1 of that process for you. (This is the feature which required the AND gate.) When a cart returns to the top of the dispenser, it triggers the summoning sequence to automagically send another cart to the load platform. The signal light tells you when the automated system is active so for heaven's sake don't push the summon button like a lab rat already. This amazing Quality Of Life feature is brought to you by Mr. D. Spatchel, Esq., who hates remembering which lever position means ON.

And here is a modified version of the Cart Dispatch System Thingo, without the automated return feature, in action on the updated Jinx ride platform. Look at it go! In this version, the signal light means "CART'S A-COMIN, HOLD YER HORSES". I am very proud of it. The dispenser holds four carts and, as the video shows, it doesn't know when it's empty. I suppose I could link a delay loop to the cart-triggered signal light, turning it off if enough time has gone by. Yes I could, I'll just go back and do that now ARGH SEE THIS IS THE PROBLEM WITH MINECRAFT, TOO MANY IDEAS AND NOT ENOUGH VIRTUAL DESKTOPS

More Minecraft dark riding

2012-05-07T20:29:37Z

I've gone and named the dark ride project Jinx, and have added a whole bunch to the 1.5 build:

Fun fact! Maybe! The ivy on the side of the wall was originally in the shape of Tetris pieces but then they grew.

I've also got a small Picasa album up with a current layout map and some construction pics with nifty bits of circuitry.

This little experiment thingo is turning into a spot of fun. There's still a lot to go, but I think I've got a very good idea for the finale.

Minecraft Dark Riding

2012-04-30T05:26:23Z

After checking out the Minecraft recreation of the Magic Kingdom and its fun interpretation of the rides (the Haunted Mansion and Splash Mountain are especially good) I decided to start work on my own Minecraft dark rides. This means learning redstone circuitry and cart physics and the odd way pistons work, so I'm having fun as I go along.

My current project is an experimental sandbox. I'm testing out ideas for visual effects, lighting, piston-activated stunts, and other fun things. I'm using the cart's motion in fun and interesting ways which require long hallways. The opening scene in the main hall shows that the cart takes curves very sharply so I'd like to try and minimize that wherever possible, or at least use the sharp turns to the design's advantage. A quick scene transition, f'rinstance. I also want to make sure everything happens enough within your peripheral vision that you don't have to use the mouse to look around a lot. The little cart that goes by in the main hall sequence is an example of that.

At any rate, my goal is to finish a ride circuit, enclose it in a show building, then create the queue and scenery to give it that good ol' fashioned authentic appearance. Oh yeah, and give it a name at some point.

Here's the video of the latest prototype, unfinished and silent. It gets a little mind-blowing in spots. I'm learning a bit from the murkier video. I'll need to place more lights in certain sections, and embellish certain scenes such as the library. (And give it a proper ending, which I neglected to mention earlier.)

The next project after this will be to create a dark ride with a cohesive story to it, and to build it on a fully seeded and generated Minecraft map. For this experimental project I selected the flat map option when starting out, and didn't realize you can't dig far underground on it. Odd, that. So the next ride, the story of which I'm currently fiddling around with, will be situated on an actual coastline and use the terrain to its advantage.

apologies, schmapologies

2012-04-09T03:59:58Z

The one-T Becket, he's a priest
The two-T Beckett, existentialiste
But I will state a fact - you check it
There's no such thing as a three-T Beckettt.

So that's what we sound like on a post-performance high

2012-04-05T06:52:20Z

A producer from PRX, an online public radio repository, came 'round to the Big Broadcast of 1954 and interviewed me and Neil during one of the nights (I believe our first Friday performance.) The resulting piece, which goes a little into the Byfar Hour's creation and features a frazzled pre-show and manic-exuberant post-show interview, has been put up for all to hear. There's also a bit from the Piscataway Queen sketch recorded from the balcony. (Context provided upon request care of this station.)

Being one of those types who doesn't enjoy the whole observing-oneself thing because of the tiny Wittgenstein on my shoulder constantly second-guessing into my ear, I shall withhold all comments except to say that Neil sounds very clever and good, I think I can live with the adjective "quirky" for this kind of work, and I kindly don't lie this time around about Frank Cyrano being real.

I DON'T KNOW, THEY JUST GAVE ME THIS AIRPLANE

2012-04-03T06:50:05Z

AND THIS VIDEO EDITING SOFTWARE

FLUKE SQUADRON
In speciem fortunae ineptia

LT. JACK SPATULA WILL RETURN IN: THROW BOMBERS AT THE TRAIN

PS YES IT IS A SILENT MOVIE AIN'T NO RIAA LAWYER GONNA SHUT DOWN THIS HERE CIRCUS

Naturally, Berle stole this line for himself

2012-03-21T06:52:05Z

"Milton Berle was responsible for the sale of more television sets than any man living. I know I sold mine, and my brother sold his."

-Joe E. Lewis, as quoted by Earl Wilson