Yesterday’s Comics Curmudgeon highlights a “Hi and Lois” strip that pretty much covers the “modern suburban malaise” genre. I like Josh’s take on “Revolutionary Road” too — it does kind of make sense as a “Titanic” sequel.

After my great blog malaise (thanks for the suggestions), all I really enjoy reading right now are comics and food blogs. Politics, go to hell. In other news, this is my first Optic post using my new WordPress install rather than my old Movable Type install with the handcrafted crossposting script. hoorah.

 

Mickey Pourke Sliders
Penelope Pockets
Slumcorndog Mustardaires
Frosty/Nixonaide
Robert Brownie Junior Mint Brownies
Cate's Caramel Corn
Sean Penne Pasta
Angiepasto
Brad Pitted Olives
Winslet's Gimlets
Wall-e Walla Onion Dip with Veggies

I was gratified that almost the first thing I saw in LA, walking into the baggage claim, was Kevin Nealon apparently picking up his parents at the airport. He looked pretty much exactly like this, as though he'd just come from the set of Weeds.

I usually have limited patience for being lectured about the evils inflicted by our corporate overlords, but this guy slips it in with some great snark about classic mcdonald's commercials. I could quote amusing bits at you all day, but just go read it for yourself. hee-larious.

Rather than some cheezy/catchy pop song, I've had wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tubeman stuck in my head all day. Aside from repeating it to myself numerous times for no apparent reason, I've also been pondering over the competing interpretations "wacky waving inflatable arm-flailing tubeman" and "wacky waving inflatable-arm flailing tubeman" and their respective implications for meaning and enunciation. also, apparently weekapaug is a real place.

PS: if that's not enough, what about intergalactic proton powered electrical tentacled advertising droids? (proper hyphenation left as an exercise for the reader)

angryrobot: i like madden 08 on the psp better than xbox 360
angryrobot: brings me back to my days playing my littl egreen handheld football game
angryrobot: http://www.oaktreeent.com/web_photos/Video_Games/Mattel_Football-2_Original_Green_web.jpg
optic: i had one of them handheld football games
luna: the one with the square football
luna: and the square players
optic: no mine was the one where the players were like single leds
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so it turns out, after some googling, that I have an erdos number of 4 (erdos - hoffman - karp - etzioni - me). but having never been in a movie, I don't have a finite bacon number or, therefore, a finite erdos-bacon number. much to my admiration, however, both natalie portman and danica mckellar (along with a handful of nerdy scientists and bertrand russell) have finite erdos-bacon numbers. that's something you can admire.

An excerpt from Neil Gaiman's American Gods, which is about, among other things, ancient gods struggling to survive in modern America. Shadow, by the way, is the man caught in the middle of the gods' machinations. Czernobog is some obscure ancient slavic god. Mr. Nancy is Anansi, the west african trickster god. When I read this my first thought was "isn't Cherryvale Kansas where Louise Brooks was born?"

Toward the end of the afternoon they stopped, at Czernobog's request, on the outskirts of Cherryvale, Kansas (pop. 2,464). Czernobog led them to a meadow outside the town. There were still traces of snow in the shadows of the trees, and the grass was the color of dirt.

"Wait here," said Czernobog.

He walked, alone, to the center of the meadow. He stood there, in the winds of the end of February, for some time. At first he hung his head, then he began gesticulating.

"He looks like he's talking to someone," said Shadow.

"Ghosts," said Mr. Nancy. "They worshipped him here, over a hundred years ago. They made blood sacrifice to him, libations spilled with the hammer. After a time, the townsfolk figured out why so many of the strangers who passed through the town didn't ever come back. This was where they hid some of the bodies.

Czernobog came back from the middle of the field. His mustache seemed darker now, and there were streaks of black in his gray hair. He smiled, showing his iron tooth. "I feel good, now. Ahh. Some things linger, and blood lingers longest."

They walked back across the meadow to where they had parked the VW bus. Czernobog lit a cigarette, but did not cough. "They did it with the hammer," he said. "Votan, he would talk of the gallows and the spear, but for me, it is one thing..."

..."They should be grateful, the people here. There was such power raised. Even thirty years after they forced my people into hiding, this land, this very land, gave us the greatest movie star of all time. She was the greatest there ever was."

"Judy Garland?" asked Shadow.

Czernobog shook his head curtly.

"He's talking about Louise Brooks," said Mr. Nancy.

I know this is old news, but there is just so much to love about this photo. So much to love.

I admit it, I like the tron civic commercial.

In honor of the fact that I'm going to speed racer school this weekend, I thought I would share one of the awesomest episodes of Dexter's Laboratory ever: dexter as speed racer.

"The first thing any successful racer needs is a car all the top racers drive cars and that's what makes them go, but cars don't grow on trees. except for this one because it's made of wood! behold, the mark 5! the mark 5 is a marvel of engineering! it's equipped with the most modern driving equipment -- wheels!"

Before I get too bookish, let's throw in a little smut (thirdhand, unfortunately). DFW writes about the porn equivalent of the academy awards. Here are a few random bits:

Probably the most neutral and economical thing to say is that large parts of the ceremony are unintentionally funny. Winning woodmen extend earnest thanks to directors and execs for giving them "an opening" or "a shot" or "my big shot" and seem wholly unaware of the carnal entendres involved. Back at the journalists' table with us is a 40ish woman in two-piece Armani who's doing a spot on the Awards for ABC Radio; she spends most of the evening hunched over with her head in her hand and her tape recorder not even on.

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Jody Rosen has a nice review of the new Justin Timberlake/Timbaland album in Slate. I like the way Rosen traces through their musical development (especially Timbaland's) with clips and Youtube links of past recordings. All that said, I don't really know about the actual review. I read a lot of reviews of pop music that go into all sorts of critique about the techniques and song structure and sounds and this-and-that, and though all that stuff is good, it's not really what defines my experience of the music. Rosen talks about all these great details of some songs, and then I listen to them and, though those things are there, I'm kind of bored anyway. Somehow, there's something more holistic in a piece of good pop music than whether it's well produced. It's kind of like reviewing a big hollywood blockbuster in terms of its qualities of character development and historical accuracy, rather than telling us how many explosions it has and whether they're satisfyingly done.

I was hoping this Slate article on peeking at your friends' Netflix queues would be amusing, but it isn't. It's completely lame and doesn't contain any observations we haven't all made a million times. I'm only linking it so I can mock the author for thinking that Annie Hall is self-obviously better than Mean Girls. please. I'll take L-lo over Diane Keaton in a top hat or whatever that shit was.

Okay I admit it. I'm totally in love with that Esurance girl. The pink hair, the green eyes, the impossibly tiny waist, the fast cars, the catsuits, the secret agent gadgetry... jebus. Okay sure, her conversational range is a little limited, but when you look like that, you don't need to be Dorothy frickin Parker. am I right folks?

That guy who's always hanging around asking about insurance has got to go though.

I just rewatched the first season of Twin Peaks (thanks for the DVDs, tom!). Two immediate comments: (1) David Lynch sure likes ladies' eyebrows; and (2) oh my gawd Sherilyn Fenn. (and (3) maybe, I used to think oh my gawd Lara Flynn Boyle but eh). I'll call spoilers on the rest of this entry, but if you still don't know what happens sixteen years after it ran, you probably don't care anyway.

My general disregard for David Lynch is well known I think, but Twin Peaks (the first season anyway) is pretty good. What was interesting to me though was watching it again in light of having seen the movie and concluded that most of the supernatural stuff was Laura's way of dealing with her horrible life. Granted, that interpretation isn't totally consistent, but it does pretty well if you ignore the going-off-the-deep-end aspects of the second season (though you're still left with Cooper and Laura's mother sharing her visions, but eh, so it's a little supernatural but mostly coherent).

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"Bigger the population, the more minorities. Don't step on the toes of the dog lovers, the cat lovers, doctors, lawyers, merchants, chiefs, Mormons, Baptists, Unitarians, second-generation Chinese, Swedes, Italians, Germans, Texans, Brooklynites, Irishmen, people from Oregon or Mexico. The people in this book, this play, this TV serial are not meant to represent any actual painters, cartographers, mechanics anywhere. The bigger your market, Montag, the less you handle controversy, remember that! All the minor minor minorities with their navels to be kept clean. Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters. They did. Magazines became a nice blend of vanilla tapioca. Books, as the damned snobbish critics said, were dishwater. No wonder books stopped selling, the critics said. But the public, knowing what it wanted, spinning happily, for the comic books survive. And the three-dimensional sex magazines, of course. There you have it, Montag. It didn't come from the Government down. There was no dictum, no declaration, no censorship, to start with, no! Technology, mass exploitation, and minority pressure carried the trick, thank God. Today, thanks to them, you can stay happy all the time, you are allowed to read comics, the good old confessions, or trade journals."

Some people would say that this has already essentially happened to us, and there's some truth to that. Certainly, there's a strain of popular culture that is basically inoffensive pablum. But that's always been woth us, and it hasn't taken over; I'd say it isn't even dominant. I think we've seen the opposite in the past ten years or so: entertainment (and other products) are increasingly niche-marketed; markets are fragmented, a version of everything for every conceivable taste and temperament. Each minor minor minority has its web sites and news sources and interest groups, and then can all carry on their self-contained lives independent of the others, except when they get in yelling matches with each other, or fight over things like TV ratings or political power. Between the extremes of blandly inoffensive and totally self-regarding lies an ideal of comity that we once, supposedly, enjoyed.

For reasons not worth going into right now, I have been spending a bit of time this week poking around MySpace, particularly looking at the people who are really really really popular there, what kinds of pages they have, etc. And let's be frank: the most popular profiles on MySpace are either bands or trashy-hot girls who are or aspire to be models or strippers, and have photos showing lots of skin. My job kinda rules. There is lots to enjoy about spending some time this way (sure beats testing and debugging), but maybe the best is reading the comments left by fans on those trashy-hot pictures. E.g., look at this profile (something like 4th most popular non-band on MySpace). Here are some of the comments on her pictures.. MySpace rules.

DAMN, you should show alittle nipple.

dame girl your so fucking fine

i like every thing on you u is the most sexyst woemen ever [BEST MYSPACE COMMENT EVER]

i think ur hot

DAMN GIRL U GOT SUM NICE ASS TITZ DAMN DAMN DAMN U FUKIN SEXXI

Slate has an amusing little tribute to He-Man, which has just been released on DVD. Of course, it's an easy target, what with its crappy animation, weak story lines, and unintentional homoerotica. But just because it's an easy target doesn't mean you can't have fun with it: He hangs out with people called Fisto and Ram Man, and they all exchange wink-wink nudge-nudge dialogue: "I'd like to hear more about this hooded seed-man of yours!"

huh huh... hooded seed-man.

Seriously, I did not think an article on YouTube lip-sync videos, nor the videos it references, could be this good.