Meet the New Blog

I feel like it's time to retire the second omnibus. I've got new blogging software. It allows me to put together no only a new blog on the .mac space I'm paying for, but to easily update and link to my new podcast. Head over there for the details, and update your links.

A Real Stand-Up Babe

Bitterspice got me the second season of "The Rockford Files" on DVD. I'm a lucky man.

I'll Do Him Ten Better

Owen Glieberman of Entertainment Weekly said of Casino Royale "Is Casino Royale the greatest Bond film ever? Let's put it this way: It will never be quite as quintessential as, say, Dr. No, the first and (to me) still the finest moment of Bond's Connery/Cold War/Playboy heyday. Yet if Casino Royale isn't a greater Bond film than that, it's a greater movie, period."

Bollocks, Mr. Glieberman.

I can not only name one Bond film better than Casino Royale, I can name ten:

1. The Spy Who Loved Me
2. Goldfinger
3. On Her Majesty's Secret Service
4. Goldeneye
5. For Your Eyes Only
6. From Russia With Love
7. Dr. No
8. The World Is Not Enough
9. Licence To Kill
10. Thunderball

What makes these 007 films better than Casino Royale? They're shorter. Their plots are tighter. Their villains are more threatening. Their romances are stronger, and M doesn't have to call Bond two minutes before the closing credits to tie up loose ends in the story.

This takes nothing away from Daniel Craig's performance. He was very good. But let's not make his debut out to be more than it is: a promising start attached to a substandard story. I'm glad Craig did well, but I've seen many better films, not just on screens this year, but in my own 007 DVD collection. If it weren't in stores everywhere, I'd offer to let Mr. Glieberman borrow it.

We Live Here

I'll pass this on without comment:

Congressman Criticizes Election of Muslim
By RACHEL L. SWARNS

WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 — In a letter sent to hundreds of voters this month, Representative Virgil H. Goode Jr., Republican of Virginia, warned that the recent election of the first Muslim to Congress posed a serious threat to the nation’s traditional values.

Mr. Goode was referring to Keith Ellison, the Minnesota Democrat and criminal defense lawyer who converted to Islam as a college student and was elected to the House in November. Mr. Ellison’s plan to use the Koran during his private swearing-in ceremony in January had outraged some Virginia voters, prompting Mr. Goode to issue a written response to them, a spokesman for Mr. Goode said.

In his letter, which was dated Dec. 5, Mr. Goode said that Americans needed to “wake up” or else there would “likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran.”

“I fear that in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America and to prevent our resources from being swamped,” said Mr. Goode, who vowed to use the Bible when taking his own oath of office.

Mr. Goode declined Wednesday to comment on his letter, which quickly stirred a furor among some Congressional Democrats and Muslim Americans, who accused him of bigotry and intolerance.

They noted that the Constitution specifically bars any religious screening of members of Congress and that the actual swearing in of those lawmakers occurs without any religious texts. The use of the Bible or Koran occurs only in private ceremonial events that take place after lawmakers have officially sworn to uphold the Constitution.

Mr. Ellison dismissed Mr. Goode’s comments, saying they seemed ill informed about his personal origins as well as about Constitutional protections of religious freedom. “I’m not an immigrant,” added Mr. Ellison, who traces his American ancestors back to 1742. “I’m an African-American.”

Since the November election, Mr. Ellison said, he has received hostile phone calls and e-mail messages along with some death threats. But in an interview on Wednesday, he emphasized that members of Congress and ordinary citizens had been overwhelmingly supportive and said he was focusing on setting up his Congressional office, getting phone lines hooked up and staff members hired, not on negative comments.

“I’m not a religious scholar, I’m a politician, and I do what politicians do, which is hopefully pass legislation to help the nation,” said Mr. Ellison, who said he planned to focus on secular issues like increasing the federal minimum wage and getting health insurance for the uninsured.

“I’m looking forward to making friends with Representative Goode, or at least getting to know him,” Mr. Ellison said, speaking by telephone from Minneapolis. “I want to let him know that there’s nothing to fear. The fact that there are many different faiths, many different colors and many different cultures in America is a great strength.”

Me Me Me Me

Time magazine, whose usefulness is declining by the second, named YOU (actually me, you pointless proles) the person of the year. And just to press the point, they put some reflective material on the cover so that you can check yourself out as you examine the cover. (Great. Yet another reason to feel inadequate in the face of Russell Crowe's cover on Vanity Fair. Couldn't those pricks from Time-Warner send along a makeup person and a lighting guy? And where's my green corn tamale and chardonnay? Don't try to slip Pinot Grigio in there instead, you fuckers, because I can fucking tell!)

It did, however, make me think of a stage rap from one of the members of Peter, Paul and Mary: (Peter, I think, and I'm paraphrasing)

In the 1920s, there was a magazine called Time, which covers a lot of ground. Imagine, all of time in one magazine. Wow! Then, in the 1930s, they came out with Life. Now life is a large part of time, but it's not all of it, just life. Then in the 1950s they came out with People, who are a smaller fraction of all of life, and an even smaller fraction of time. By the 1970s, the new magazine was Us. We won't talk about them; we'll only talk about us. Then the 1980s brought us Self. I think that by the 1990s there's only one place for magazines to go: ME. It'll be twenty pages of Reynold's Wrap.

I suppose in selecting its person of the year, Time earns credit for irony.

In the meantime, while all y'all are busy jerking yourselves off with the story that you control the world, people will keep dying in Iraq, companies will keep shipping your pension funds to Switzerland and the Caymans, and the richest 1% of the world will add another percent or two to their share of the world's wealth while you pay an increasing share of their taxes. Don't think of that, just look at the magazine--shiny pretty magazine.

Life's Soundtrack

Here's Bitterspice's list. Here's mine:

1. Opening Credits: Coast of Malabar—The Chieftans
2. Waking Up: Swagger—Flogging Molly
3. First Day At School: You and Oblivion—Robyn Hitchcock
4. Fight Song: Closing Time—Leonard Cohen
5. Breaking Up: Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard—Paul Simon
6. Happiness: All the Way to Reno (You’re Gonna Be A Star)--R.E.M.
7. Life’s Okay: Mary Jane—Alanis Morisette
8. Mental Breakdown: Bittersweet Me—R.E.M.
9. Driving: I Won’t Back Down—Tom Petty
10. Flashback: Drunken Lullabies—Flogging Molly
11. Getting Back Together: Sky is a Poisonous Garden—Concrete Blonde
12. Wedding: 4:50 AM (Go Fishing)—Roger Waters
13. Birth of a Child: Piano Sonata in A, D. 959: 3. Scherzo—Franz Schubert
14. Final Battle: Don’t Get Around Much Anymore—Louis Armstrong
15. Death Scene: Better Version of Me—Fiona Apple
16. Funeral Scene: Tom’s Diner—Suzanne Vega and D.N.A.
17. End Credits: Mountain Song—Jane’s Addiction

I can't picture the sort of battle I'd wage during Louis Armstrong's "Don't Get Around Much Anymore", but that's shuffle for you.

What Kind of Seducer I am

Bitterspice turned me on to this:

Okay. I'll take libertine, but lazy am I? Lazy, you pustulent crackwhores?!? I just finished my second book, which makes two more books than the current President of the United States has ever seen. The correct answer is "psychopathic"! Okay. Okay. Calming down. Will. Not. Kill. Tonight. Put. Away. Chainsaw.

Calm. Calm. Serene. Serene.

I learned that from James Coburn, who used it to settle Animal down on The Muppet Show.

I'm Back, Briefly Anyway

I know I haven't blogged in roughly 7.3 million years. Let me make up for it. Trolling around with nothing better to do, I found David Cross's bit on serial liar James Frey. It's damn funny. Check it out.

The War In Bill-O's Head

The holiday season foists its share of unpleasant rituals upon us--the annual declaration of the hot new toy, the obligatory footage of consumer driven idiots forcing their way into Macy's, any TV special with the ending "on ice", and the knowledge that the cousins from Kansas that you hate will once again fail to take a plane that has the decency to crash. Still, there's one miserable ritual that top 'em all, one fatuous, tenth rate holiday habit that, like the evil ring of power, binds all the others into an unbeatable monstrosity of idiocy. That's Bill O'Reilly's annual War on Christmas.

People deal with this unloved and unwelcome intrusion in all sorts of ways. Mocking it can be fun, especially if you're the owner of large amounts of whiskey. (A proposed drinking game: every time Bill O'Reilly accuses the secular left of a plot, you take a drink. During the silly season, you may not make it through his whole show alive.) Others try ignoring it, but I'll try something I rarely attempt here: sincerity.

Until O'Reilly started raising a stink about which holiday greeting Target stores gave their customers, I really didn't think about the distinction between "Merry Christmas" and "Happy Holidays", or the less popular "Season's Greetings". I assumed that those using "Merry Christmas" or "Happy Hanukkah" were expressing good wishes intended to correspond to the specific, named holiday; whereas "Happy Holidays" and "Season's Greetings" were used to refer to the period containing the holidays Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, New Year's Eve, and New Year's Day. Each greeting had its uses, and no matter which greeting a shopkeeper or passer-by settled on when addressing me, I assumed it was just an expression of friendliness and general goodwill. I'd respond in kind, and go on my way.

What bugs me most about what O'Reilly has done in ginning up this stupid controversy is that he's taken what should be a congenial gesture and turned it into a club to beat his enemies with. O'Reilly's made it hard to hear "Merry Christmas" without thinking of him, and because of that, he's vexed the words. Now I'm not allowed to simply smile and say "Merry Christmas" back. Instead I have to wonder what the person's motive is in saying "Merry Christmas". Is the gesture still friendly, or is it some sort of test? If I respond with "Happy Holidays" instead, or simply smile and wave or say "Thank you", does that mean I don't back Christmas with enough zeal? What should happen to me then? Should I be made to stand in front of a church and subject myself to Stalinist self-criticism? Should I be set in stocks at a mall where people can throw ornaments and fruit cake at me? I never saw Christmas as a chance to force my fellow man to declare a side. In this I must admit Bill O'Reilly's imagination is larger than mine.

Only a man as thoroughly lacking in the Christmas spirit as O'Reilly is would take a holiday meant to celebrate universal brotherhood and pervert it into an occasion for smearing and bullying. You're a punk, Bill. You really are.

Merry Christmas.

I've Seen The Future, and It's Really Hackneyed

I stopped writing in the SF genre about eight years ago. It was an easy divorce, fueled by mutual indifference. I wasn't writing material that excited most SF editors (except for Dean Wesley Smith, editor of the sadly dead Pulphouse), and they weren't publishing material that interested me. So I moved on to literary fiction, and left them to figure out new ways in which people could download themselves into computers and threaten our civil liberties. Sometimes, though, like Lot's wife, I have to look back to see what I left behind. I didn't turn into a pillar of salt upon reading Orson Scott Card's new manuscript, Emprie, but I must say that I envy Mrs. Lot her good fortune.

The blurb for Empire promises a "chilling look at a near-future scenario of a new American Civil War." What Card provides is a tale of two soldiers, Cole and Rube (as their friends, Card says, like to call them) who, in the midst of the devastating war of words between right and left and the terrorist threat of Al Qaida, know that America needs to stop listening to professors and trust good solid military men who always act for the country's best interest and never surrender to anything, not even personal bias. In an introspective moment, Rube wonders whether he's as closed minded as the representatives of the "insane Left", his fellow Ivy League graduate students:

Am I like them, just a bigot learning only what fits my worldview? That's what he kept asking himself. But finally he reached the conclusion: No, he was not. He faced every piece of information as it came. He questioned his own assumptions whenever the information seemed to violate it. Above all, he changed his mind -- and often. Sometimes only by increments; sometimes completely. Heroes he had once admired -- Douglas MacArthur, for instance -- he now regarded with something akin to horror: How could a commander be so vain, with so little justification for it? Others that he had disdained -- that great clerk, Eisenhower, or that woeful incompetent, Burnside -- he had learned to appreciate for their considerable virtues.

Yes, because as we know, the most reliable judge of whether a person is closed-minded or not is the person himself. Just ask Dick Cheney. Under other circumstances, I'd assume that this passage was meant ironically. But after reading this passage, I came to doubt that its author could claim that irony was in his bag of tricks

"I want our babies to be as smart as you and as tough as me," he [Rube] said.

"I just want them to look like me," said Cessy. "Because having daughters that look like you would be cruel."

Their daughters did look like Cessy, and their sons had Reuben's lean, lithe body, and all in all, their family life was perfect. That's what he came home to every day from school; that was the environment in which he studied. That was his root in reality that kept calling him back from the brink of getting seduced into the fantasyland of academia.

Until Averell Torrent decided he wanted Reuben's soul.

Averell Torrent, by the way, is one of those nasty academics, decked out in this passage with horns and a pointy tail (or maybe a black cape and fangs. I can't decide which). Rube's impatience with academia, his tendency to believe that anyone who enjoys the life of the mind is either a fraud or a nut, mirrors Card's expressed feelings about the professors whose love of literary fiction denies Card's books respectability. Rube imagines he's avoiding the crimes of the extremists and elitists, but he commits their worst sin. He assumes that everyone who disagrees with him, or expresses an opinion he finds beyond the pale, is either sinister or stupid. The saner of us figure that some of our opponents are sinister or stupid, whereas others oppose us for perfectly legitimate reasons, from their point of view. But acknowledging that requires us to recognize nuance, and Orson Scott Card doesn't do nuance.

When Empire isn't occupied with putting black hats on Card's--er, excuse me--Rube's enemies and white hats on his friends, it's treating its readers as if they were fools. Take this passage, where the narrator demonstrates a command of the obvious so stunning it rivals Leslie Neilsen's response to the question: "A Hospital! What is it?"*:

They made their way back through the southwest gate, past the same MPs, past the emergency vehicles and military vehicles and the cordon of soldiers that were now completely surrounding the White House. Cole finally asked, "Even if you're arrested, you know they can't convict you of anything."

"I'm not afraid of being convicted," said Malich.

"What, then?"

"I'm afraid of Jack Ruby."

The guy who assassinated Lee Harvey Oswald before he could be tried. The guy who made sure that the tough questions about the Kennedy assassination could never be answered.

Gee, uh, thanks Orson. I'd never heard of Jack Ruby before...um...duh... What's next? "Malich saw a picture of Jack Nicholson. Yes, that Jack Nicholson, star of A Few Good Men, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Five Easy Pieces."

I guess it shouldn't surprise me that Card would stick this line in here. To him, everyone's an idiot. Without him, people wouldn't know how to vote, to read history, or to tie shoes. And failure to heed his warnings and condemn his enemies brings terrible consequences...tsk, tsk...terrible:

"You look pissed off," said Malich.

"Yeah," said Cole. "The terrorists are crazy and scary, but what really pisses me off is knowing that this will make a whole bunch of European intellectuals very happy."

"They won't be so happy when they see where it leads. They've already forgotten Sarajevo and the killing fields of Flanders."

I wasn't so happy to see where it led either. This last quote was from Chapter Five, and the way I figured it, there was a whole lot more book to go after that. And no rube or intellectual, European or American, Muslim or Christian, Freemason or Elk, Mugwump or Whig, Republican or Democrat could claim happiness upon receipt of that news.

*Neilsen's answer: "It's a big building with patients, but that's not important right now."