The Return of Nobody

Sorry for the unannounced six week vacation, kids! Not to worry, though. I’m back and all is well.

Rhymes with Taco Bell

I’m stealing this outright from the PRT but it’s so tasty I can’t resist!

Journeyman

As Prison Break gets increasing dark and decreasingly fun, my favorite new show is Journeyman! We’re apparently seven weeks behind as tonight I just saw a repeat of the first episode, following Prison Break on SkyOne, but it looks like NBC will be airing Episode 8 tonight. If it’s anything like the first – and word is the show gets better every week — you’re in for a great balance of episode-length micro-story with macro-arc intrigue related to the time-travelling protagonist’s personal life, which is immediately complicated by the fact that in the past he’s engaged to a different woman than the one he’s married to in the present.

Kevin McKidd (Rome’s Lucius) is undeniably a poor-man’s Daniel Craig but I think I’ll soon be able to see him as himself instead of just a budget-friendly lookalike. Though Journeyman shares similarities with Early Edition, the unpredictable time-travelling premise should keep it from being as formulaic, taking its cues instead from Frequency and Heroes’ Hiro. And being filmed in the most photogenic city on earth (San Francisco) makes it all the more easy on the eyes.

It’s About Time!

Can you imagine what JFK would have thought if someone had told him in 1961, when he promised a moonwalk by the end of the decade, that it would take an additional 50 years before we got around to building a moonbase? He probably would have laughed at your lack of vision and scolded you for being so pessimistic.

Sure, we honored his memory by achieving his goal with months to spare, but the mind-boggling accomplishment of putting Man on the Moon inspired nothing so much as a 38-year vacation from interplanetary progress.

But Rip van Winkle-like, NASA have finally been roused from their stupor and are talking Moonbase by 2020. This is the first step towards removing the 500-year stigma of violence from colonialism and creating a world, or rather a solar system, in which imperialism not only doesn’t imply genocide, it’s categorically impossible.

With the suburbanization of space finally underway, we can look forward to a future in which Republicans will be from Mars, Democrats from Neptune; the best show on TV will be “Triton Break”; feminists and pro-lifers will be united in common cause; and Earth’s environment will finally be saved from human litter. (To find out why, consult this post.)

The Bob Law Blog

Guess what, A.D. addicts!

Bob Loblaw, Attorney at Law, really exists!

He even has his own law blog!

Thanks to Dr. K for the notice (and his favorite clips of Bob Loblaw in action).

One Minute Movies

In Academy, R. Luke DuBois has compressed the images and sounds of every year’s Best Picture (through 2003) into a single minute.  The results are fascinating. A few online excerpts of Academy:

Wings in 60 seconds

Gone with the Wind in 60 seconds

From Here to Eternity in 60 seconds

West Side Story in 60 seconds

The French Connection in 60 seconds

Amadeus in 60 seconds

Titanic in 60 seconds

I’m also very intrigued by DuBois’ recent project, Fashionably Late for the Relationship, a 72-hour performance by Lian Amaris Sifuentes on a traffic island outside Union Station, accelerated into a 72-minute film. I haven’t seen it but I presume the actress’ movements were about 1/60th normal speed so that in the final product they look normal while city life speeds by around her.

Sympathy for the Dumb

I’m trying to go to bed but I can’t help rewatching this video of a “Miss Teen USA” contestant trying to answer a question. The fact that it’s a softball question is practically beside the point, though it enriches the humor. The first half of the answer is funny enough just because of the look on her face of either (a) thinking extra hard, or (b) total vacuity (I’m not sure which), but despite how dumb her answer is, at least it’s a grammatically decipherable sentence.

After about second 23 though, she seems to forget what the question is but think she’s on a roll and must add a few de rigeur platitudes before her time runs out. The subsequent series of free association is so funny, yet so pure as an immediate verbalisation of every phrase that pops into her head like a Mad Libs of Miss America phrases, repeatedly aborted mid-statement by uncertainty.

Although she’s admittedly an empty head (an observation so obvious it’s almost gratuitous to state explicity, like saying a mentally handicapped person is, admittedly, retarded) she must have been distracted by something to so completely lose her train of thought. The panic on her face, as if in realisation that she’s out of her depth in a bird bath, makes me unexpectedly sympathise with her.

But ultimately her answer is the purest expression of Beauty Pageant discourse, and revelatory of the thought process behind any such answer. It is a rare moment of truth that deconstructs the soundbite to its basic nature: a series of sub-bite particles that, when strung together, usually come out sounding like a sentence. Ideally a sentence that sounds compassionate and optimistic rather than patronising and naive.

But unfortunately for Miss South Carolina, a few synapses misfired in her freak brainstorm so this time the sub-bite particles didn’t come out sounding like a sentence. It was just bad luck for her because, honestly, it could have happened to any one of her rivals.

What do Mount Rushmore, Tony Danza, and the Anglo-Saxon alliance have in common?

They’re all menaces to society! I guess.

And here I thought my miscellaneous ramblings were amusing. This fellow sees my demented screed and raises me 57 pages of stream-of-consciousness defendant-naming.

Most are obvious blame-throwing targets (NBA commissioner David Stern, Bono). Others, not so much (the architecture of Free Masonry, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children). But one thing’s for sure: if you’re not on this list, you’re nobody!

I’ve read it twice now and am still laughing out loud at entries.

Niccolo Machiavelli.

Steven Spielberg.

The Folger Shakespeare Library.

“Kim Jong 11.”

The Hegelian Principle.

Maddox Pitt-Jolie.

The Planet of Pluto. (That one obviously dates the document to pre-August 2006.)

Chubby Checker.

The Colossus of Rhodes.

I could endlessly list my favorites until I’ve just reproduced the PDF itself.

8 Mile Stones

I’ve been tagged by both Pacheco of Bohemian Cinema and Matt of MereO with the Eight Random Biographical Anecdotes meme.

It’s interesting how memes evolve; this one arrived to me in two distinct permutations, similar in matter but different in form. Pacheco’s instructs:

1. We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
2. Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
3. People who are tagged write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
4. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

Meanwhile, Matt’s is more terse, and rearranged:

1. Let others know who tagged you.
2. Players post 8 random facts about themselves.
3. Those who are tagged should post these rules with their 8 facts.
4. Players should tag 8 other people and notify them they have been tagged.

For better or for worse I haven’t seen a single blog that hasn’t already been assimilated by this blog-Borg in its inexorable march across cyberspace. When Pacheco tagged me a week and a half ago I thought, well at least I could tag Matt, but while moving distracted me from the internet last week he preemptively struck. Now it would be too much work to find eight fresh victims, so I’ll just follow Jim’s lead and blatantly flout Rule 4.

But without further qualification, here are eight tedious items of self-mythologizing by Nobody in particular:

1. Until this year I had never seen Pulp Fiction. Sorry to say I was unimpressed, so I can only imagine the “revelation” it was at the time. Unfortunately Willis was the only good actor; Travolta and Jackson were the worst, incapable of making Tarantino’s script sound unrehearsed. Can any human do? Or is his trademark dialogue simply inhumane?

2. Other “modern classics” I haven’t seen are Jurassic Park and Titanic. My flatmates think this is evidence of film snobbery. Then I remind them I see every comic book adaptation regardless of quality and consider Casino Royale one of the best three movies of 2006.

3. BC (before Craig), the only Bond films I’d seen were Tomorrow Never Dies and Die Another Day. AD (after Daniel), Casino Royale inspired me to get the Deluxe Editions of every Connery (and the Lazenby) Bond film and watch them in sequence.

4. For most of my life I intended to draw comic books for a living, but at 15 I realized there was no job security as a freelance artist and didn’t want to live the rest of my life with monthly deadlines.

5. Around the same time, I first entertained the thought of majoring in English instead of Art when I realized I could do a better job teaching my literature class after having to explain to the teacher in class the double-possessive of “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale.”

6. At 10 years old my obsession with basketball began, and for the next few years most afternoons and evenings were spent practicing in the driveway. I played in Park & Rec leagues for five years, and on my high school varsity team in 11th and 12th grade.

7. I had piano lessons from the ages of 5 to 10, when I discovered basketball.

8. I was awakened one morning at the age of 11 by a 7.3 earthquake whose epicenter was 30 miles away. (Since it was not in an urban area there were no casualties, but its magnitude can be demonstrated by the fact that the Northridge quake two years later caused 72 deaths, 11,000 injuries, and $12 billion damage with only a 6.7 magnitude.)

Needless to say this shook me up, but I endured the aftershocks for the next few hours with equanimity, comforted as always by the knowledge that the big stuff was behind me.

But three hours after the first quake there was a 6.4 follow-up that felt even more violent since it was only 5 miles away. This contradiction of prior experience kind of traumatized me. Now, it seemed, all bets were off: I was no longer safe in my bed. If you know me, ask me sometime how it affected my sleeping habits for the following months.

Set Faces to Stunned

Google Maps just added Street View! How cool is that?