Seriously, y’all, I committed myself to too many “of the day/week/month”-type things already, so I’m just going to post stuff whenever I feel like it, and you’re going to like it.
This is a mini-Mini-Cooper.
Via guyism.com
You’re welcome.
You might find this surprising, but I’m kind of a geek.
I mean this on several levels. On certain issues of pop culture or history, I have a peculiarly encyclopedic knowledge, while finding myself cripplingly hamstrung in other arenas. I also have a tendency towards pompous certainty when it comes to my particular areas of knowledge, although I have tried to reign it in during the past few years. History will decide if I succeeded or not.
It therefore came as an embarrassing shock to me to learn, via Justin Griffith at FreeThought Blogs, that a beloved ’80s anthem contained a glaring error. Specifically, the Dead Milkmen’s “Punk Rock Girl” name-checked the wrong band:
We went to the Phillie Pizza Company
And ordered some hot tea
The waitress said “Well no
We only have it iced”
So we jumped up on the table
And shouted “anarchy”
And someone played a Beach Boys song
On the jukebox
It was “California Dreamin'”
So we started screamin’
“On such a winter’s day”
(Emphasis added)
See the problem? “California Dreamin'” is not a Beach Boys song. It was the Mamas and the Papas (although to be fair, the Beach Boys did record a cover in 1986. It just wasn’t nearly as good.) The Dead Milkmen released “Punk Rock Girl” in 1988, i.e. twenty-four years ago, and I never noticed the discrepancy until just now.
I have failed you, Gods of Geekdom. I offer myself in atonement.
BONUS FEATURE: I also want to acknowledge two of my favorite rhymes in all of songwriting history, courtesy of “Punk Rock Girl”:
She took me to her parents
For a Sunday meal
Her father took one look at me
And he began to squeal
And
We got into a car
Away we started rollin’
I said “How much you pay for this?”
She said “Nothing man, it’s stolen”
Honorable mention goes to “If you don’t got Mojo Nixon then your store could use some fixin.'”
It occurred to me that this is the third-to-last sequential-numbers date we’ll have for nearly a century. Next year we’ll have 11-12-13, and after that 12-13-14 (assuming we don’t all vaporize on 12-21-12, of course.) That’s it until the next 1-2-03, though (assuming civilization survives Y2.1K, of course.)
Also, of course, there was that whole viral thing in Prometheus:
I had an elaborate blog post in mind after I saw Prometheus in the theater, but I never wrote it. I think I am still processing my feelings about the film. At least one of those feelings, I’ll admit, is disappointment. (It took me years to admit, even to myself, that Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace was a lousy, lousy movie. Prometheus was better than Phantom Menace.)
Anyway, today’s date appeared in this image from the end credits of Prometheus, and it leads you to some other viral stuff that may or may not be significant to something. To be honest, I only intended to write a brief post pondering the ethereal nature of numbers, and how a date like 10-11-12 can take on imaginary meaning. When I started to type “10/11/12” into Google, though, it auto-filled “10/11/12 at the end of prometheus,” and that sort of sucked me in.
Since I don’t really have anything else meaningful to say this morning, here are a couple of GIFs of Jessica Simpson at a car wash: Continue reading
Remember the early scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey when the newly-smartened proto-hominid beats the leader of the competing pack to death with a bone, throws the bone up in the air, and the bone turns into a spaceship? Did you know that spaceship was originally supposed to be an orbiting nuclear weapons platform?
I just though that was an interesting bit of trivia. The film originally set up a continued nuclear stalemate between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, and the first spaceship we see was meant to be a missile launcher. At the end, when Dave Bowman appears above Earth as the Starchild, he was going to detonate all the nukes in orbit, which I guess was meant to bring Peace on Earth. Or a massive EMP returning Earth to the Stone Age. One of those, probably.
Anyway, Stanley Kubrick’s most recent film at the time was 1964’s Dr. Strangelove, so he was kind of over telling Cold War nuke stories. As Wikipedia says:
Another holdover of discarded plot ideas is with regard to the famous match-cut from prehistoric bone-weapon to orbiting satellite, followed sequentially by views of three more satellites. At first, Kubrick planned to have a narrator state explicitly that these were armed nuclear weapon platforms while speaking of a nuclear stalemate between the superpowers.[60]
This would have foreshadowed the now-discarded conclusion of the film showing the Star Child’s detonating all of them.[61] Piers Bizony, in his book 2001 Filming The Future, stated that after ordering designs for orbiting nuclear weapon platforms, Kubrick became convinced to avoid too many associations with Dr. Strangelove, and he decided not to make it so obvious that they were “war machines”.[62]
Alexander Walker, in a book he wrote with Kubrick’s assistance and authorization, described the bone as “transformed into a spacecraft of the year A.D. 2001 as it orbits in the blackness around Earth”, and he stated that Kubrick eliminated from his film the theme of a nuclear stalemate between the United States and the Soviet Union, each with a globe-orbiting nuclear weapons. Kubrick now thought this had “no place at all in the film’s thematic development”, with the bombs now becoming an “orbiting red herring”. Walker further noted that some filmgoers in 1968-69 would know that an agreement had been reached in 1967 between the powers not to put any nuclear weapons into outer space, and that if the film suggested otherwise, it would “merely have raised irrelevant questions to suggest this as a reality of the twenty-first century”.[63]
In the Canadian TV documentary 2001 and Beyond, Dr. Clarke stated that not only was the military purpose of the satellites “not spelled out in the film, there is no need for it to be”, repeating later in this documentary that “Stanley didn’t want to have anything to do with bombs after Dr. Strangelove”.[64] Continue reading
Do you hear that? It’s the sound of the dead, desiccated husk of my childhood idealism blowing away on a warm desert wind…
Not too long ago, I tried to watch the pilot episode of the original Transformers cartoon on Netflix Instant. You know how some children’s cartoons actually operate on multiple levels, so that adults can find something entertaining in them, too? This was not one of those cartoons. This was an unrepentant 1980’s toy commercial stretched out over about 22 minutes without the actual commercials.
In an unrelated incident, my random wanderings through Wikipedia in the cause of avoiding anything productive or income-generating led me to some recaps of the old series, now known as Transformers: Generation 1 to distinguish it from all the subsequent canon-destroying cartoons and live-action sludge that followed. I stopped watching the Transformers cartoon after the second season in 1986, not coincidentally the same year I started junior high school. Therefore, I missed a rather, ahem, colorful character they added in season 3. I Googled this extensively because I refused to believe the description of a new human character, “the dictator Abdul Fakkadi of the desert nation of Carbombya.”
I dare say I need to repeat that for incredulity: “the dictator Abdul Fakkadi of the desert nation of Carbombya.”
TFWiki.net describes this fictional nation as follows:
The Socialist Democratic Federated Republic of Carbombya is a kingdom located in the Sahara Desert region of the continent of Africa on the planet Earth. It has a coastline, with foreign ships that venture too close to it often being fired upon. This intensely xenophobic state is ruled by Abdul Fakkadi, and apparently derives most of its wealth from particularly fine oil. The people are often heard swearing on the lives of their mother’s camels and so forth. This is of course
hilariousoffensively stereotypical.Its city of Carbombya City, population 4,000 (and 10,000 camels), is presumably the capital.
(See also Transformers Wiki at wikia.com.)
It’s a kingdom with a socialist, federal republic system? With a dictator? Um, got it…..
The symbolism is pretty obvious. Clumsy, even. This was 1986, of course, when American esteem for Arab nations was certainly even lower than it is now. I can totally picture the writer who conceived of this character and country, who I am certain has never even seen a book on political science. I’m sure he laughed at his own cleverness as he spilled Cheeto dust onto his anti-Gaddafi t-shirt.
Yeah, something like this.
Photo credit: ‘Carbombya Marker’ © 1986 Sunbow Productions, Marvel Productions, and Hasbro, via tfwiki.net; ‘Khadaffy Duck’ by vintageretrowear, via defunkd.com. You had best believe I’m claiming fair use on this bullshit.
I came across this brief post as I was scrolling through Tumblr entitled “I still wonder what happened to the rest of the world in The Hunger Games”:
Do they still have meetings and stuff?
France: Anyone heard from America lately?
Mexico: Same old, same old. They’re still sending out children to fight to the death in a reality show.
UK: Shouldn’t we do something about that?
China: Just leave them, at least they’re not annoying us.
We have a rather extensive set of post-apocalyptic or dystopian speculative fiction set within the boundaries of the United States or North America, but not much looking at such an America from the outside. Speculative fiction, by offering a view of a possible future, is often the best vehicle for commenting on or criticizing today’s political, economic, or social realities. Think of how much social commentary the original Star Trek was able to accomplish by setting its stories in a quasi-utopian future humanity. I too wonder what a post-disaster U.S. would look like from a non-U.S. perspective, particularly one from the “developing world.”
In terms of post-apocalyptic or dystopian future Americas, aside from The Hunger Games, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road comes to mind, along with alternate history works like Harry Turtledove’s “Timeline-191” series and about half the episodes of the TV show Sliders. Then there are TV shows like Jericho, which portrayed a modern-day nuclear attack, and Terra Nova, which was set 85 million years ago but centered around a dangerously polluted 22nd-century America. The new ABC show Last Resort, about which I will probably write more later, depicts a potentially dystopian contemporary or near-future United States. These all focus on America itself, though.
Robert Silverberg’s Time of the Great Freeze takes place during a future Ice Age, where ice sheets have covered much of North America. The protagonists leave their underground city in North America after picking up a radio signal from the London area, intending to cross the ice sheet over the Atlantic. The book mentions that, with much of Europe, North America, and East Asia covered in ice, the equatorial nations of South America, Africa, and Asia have become dominant world powers. It still doesn’t tell us anything about life in those places.
The Brits Seem to Have No Problem Blowing Us Up in Fiction
The best examples I can think of, that deal with the rest of the world, should the United States go all post-apocalyptic or dystopian, come from Great Britain or other English-speaking countries. The films V for Vendetta and Children of Men both came out around the same time in 2005 or 2006. Both are set in the relatively-near future: V for Vendatta mentions the year 2015 as the not-too-distant past, and Clive Owen’s character in Children of Men wears an extremely ratty London 2012 Olympics sweatshirt for much of the film. Both films reference events in “the former United States,” and both depict a UK turned to dictatorship in one form or another. Nevil Shute’s On the Beach, set in Australia, shows a U.S. devastated by nuclear war. Continue reading
Image via Wikipedia
Eleven different actors have portrayed the character of the Doctor over the past forty-nine years on the BBC’s Doctor Who. I haven’t read anything to suggest that Matt Smith, who currently plays the eleventh Doctor, plans on leaving the show anytime soon, but last night’s episode got me thinking about other people who might play the role.
For those not familiar with Doctor Who, the show has a brilliant way of explaining how multiple people can play the same character in succession over time, which is this: the Doctor’s species, the Time Lords, are effectively immortal, although they can sustain fatal injuries. In the event of a mortal wound, however, they have the power to “regenerate,” meaning they re-form themselves in a changed body. Since the show rebooted in 2005, three actors have played the role: Christopher Eccleston, David Tennant, and now Matt Smith. Each version of the Doctor tends to get his own story lines, but it is still the same character.
Last night’s episode had a considerable amount of build-up, as it was the last episode to include the Doctor’s companions Amy Pond and Rory Williams. Without giving any spoilers, let me just say it was heartbreaking, but not as heartbreaking as I feared it would be. The new companion, played by Jenna-Louise Coleman, has already appeared in one episode of the show, and will be returning around Christmas (possibly as a different character), when the show starts up again. Sources are saying that, once she joins the show full-time, the Doctor will be a “different man.” Considering the way Amy and Rory exited the show (again, no spoilers!), that would not be surprising.
Sooner or later, Matt Smith will leave the show. The longest-serving actor in the role was Tom Baker, who played the part from 1974 to 1981. Matt Smith has only been on the show for two full seasons, so far. Two things that all eleven actors have had in common is that they have all been, first of all, actors, and second, white British guys. I cannot fathom a Doctor who wasn’t British (seriously, America, if you try to re-make Doctor Who here, I will do something rash), but what if the Doctor regenerated as someone other than a white dude? After all, one of Matt Smith’s first lines as the newly-regenerated Doctor was to lament that he still wasn’t a ginger. Based on the past three actors, the Doctor needs a frenetic, occasionally goofy manner that belies a deep intelligence and an even deeper malaise, clearly born of more than 1,200 years of traveling both space and time. Here are a few ideas I just pulled out of somewhere, and you have to admit, any of these people would probably rock. Continue reading
I recently offered a wee tribute to Firefly, the show that revolutionized television for at least five or six people ten years ago. It later found new life on DVD, developed a bigger following, and made me sound like an elitist hipster when I talked about how I watched it when it was still destined for cancellation.
One feature of the show that I never really considered until today was what it had to say about contract law. Thankfully, the Legal Geeks had the idea before I did (dangit) and offered their thoughts on the matter:
Firefly was wickedly creative, well-written and had fantastic humor. Spaceships and wardrobe that ranged from Western to Steampunk to Chinese aside, Firefly presented excellent Contract formation issues.
Contract formation consists of 1) Offer; 2) Acceptance; 3) Consideration; and 4) Performance.
In the world of Firefly, it was often 1) Offer 2) Acceptance 3) Gunfight (also known as breach).
The show was actually like a brilliant 1L contracts class:
And that was just the first two episodes.
If you want to get super geeky, and maybe a little bit blue, we could talk about in-kind service exchanges as consideration in the episode “Heart of Gold.”
Anyway, I don’t want to steal the Legal Geeks’ thunder. I’ll even link to their post a second time so you’ll be sure to visit them.
Until next time, keep flyin’.
Photo credit: Via alwayswithapplesandcherries.tumblr.com.
