Stuck behind a pace car

Usually I feel like I'm stuck behind lap traffic. I tend to drive a little fast, so when there's too much traffic to bob and weave, or just a few people blocking I get cranky. Most of the time I can squeeze out an opening within a half mile or so, but occasionally it's much worse. Today, I got stuck behind frakin' pace cars.

I left the house a little late this morning (I had to break down and find the wireless card and drivers that I'd never used in my laptop because the built-in wireless was stable enough until last night) and was on the road just past 9am. Very little traffic at that time as most people who are working are there and the schools are battened down for a day of learnin'. I was thoroughly enjoying my steady mile-a-minute pace down one of the fine, broad, east-west streets here in the PHX.

As I'm coming up to a light, I catch a gold 'Vette in my rear view making some serious time. I know this approach. He saw the batmobile and wants to play. I'm all about that. With newer 'Vettes, I've got them up to around 85 or 90mph, but they've got a big advantage in the 90-105 range. I know they're pushing a few more horses than I am, but it's a gearing issue that's really screwing me. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to take it much beyond the 105 (maybe once in awhile I should get off city streets) to see if I can catch back up when I get into the power band again in 4th gear.

So we get to the light and there are two cars in front of us - an old Lincoln and an old beat-to-hell ¿Celica?. We make our guesses as to who's going to get off the line faster, knowing that we won't be drag racing, but figuring we'll at least eventually get to it. He's definitely put some after-market work into the 'Vette, because his exhaust and engine sound even throatier than the Panoz's. If we can get around these two, it should be a ball.

The light turns and both cars go slooooooow. I mean, speed-limit slow. Maybe. He's behind the Lincoln and that car is ever so slowly making ground on my guy, so I slip in behind the 'Vette and hope. Then the beater starts to move a wee bit faster and my new buddy pops to the right. The whole time, both of us are laughing and shrugging our shoulders at each other. We can't cut a break today. No race this morning.

It's just a Jump to the left...

I'm shocked (and a little embarrassed) to say that this trailer for Jumper really excited me. First off, I've been a fan of Doug Liman since Go (I consider his work on Swingers to be secondary to Fav's great, great screenplay.) Second, the efx look really cool. This is a bit more like what Nightcrawler should have looked like in X2.

The shock comes from not vomiting over the presence of Anacan'tact Skywalker or Rachel Bilson (I think she's horribly overrated as both actress and "hot young thing".) And for those of you who think Hayden's problem was the poor writing and direction of George Lucas, I submit to you Shattered Glass, in which he was all sorts of bad amongst another very solid cast.

If Liman somehow found a way to get something resembling a performance out of Drab Vader, this movie could be all kinds of fun.

On a five year mission to...what? We're canceled already? Crap. Fine. Let the Earth Explode!

I'd be more thrilled by this if I got SciFi in HD; however, because I have the one-and-only HD DirecTivo, I can't get all the new MPEG-4 channels. We figure in a few months, after the floor, after the holidays, we'll explore our options through DirecTV and *gulp* Cox cable. Until then, just a handful of HD channels.

Anyway, starting this Friday on SciFi, they'll be re-running Odyssey 5. This was a great show that I caught a couple years back after it had been shit-canned by Showtime. Unfortunately, it only lasted one season instead of the five that Manny Coto had planned out. Still, this is a great little show with a nice blend of serialized mythos - they are, after all, trying to save the Earth from certain destruction - and episodic story-telling. A little The X Files in feel, but fewer scenes shot in dark tunnels.

It stars Buckaroo Banzai as Chuck Taggart and has a great cast, including the criminally under-appreciated Jake 2.0 as his son Neil.

If you liked The X Files, or any of the since-canceled dark, serial SF shows, give this one a shot. Or, just buy it here.

Rejection: Official

Woohoo. Well, it's official. WB rejected me.

Dear Applicant,

Thank you for applying to the Warner Bros. Television Writer's Workshop. After careful evaluation and consideration of the hundreds of scripts we received, we are unable to include your submission(s) in the final round.

We wish you well in all of your future writing endeavors and thank you again for your interest in the workshop.

Now some might feel a little down by this seeming form letter, but if you look closely you'll see the very personal touch.

• "Dear Applicant". That's right. I'm not just some random applicant, I'm dear to them.
• Note that they carefully evaluated scripts. They weren't haphazard about it.
• Also see how they try to pretend they don't know how many scripts I submitted to the program? Those kidders!

Next year.

"Oh shit, he's dumb as hell."

Frankly, I don't think I needed to hear Tricky Dick from beyond the grave to figure out that Fred Thompson "isn't very smart". It's always nice to get confirmation, though.

WE'RE GOING THE WRONG WAY!

There's video above, FeedReader
I frequently feel as though I'm going the wrong way, too Katee.

I swear, I'd only write for MALE stars!!!

Sure. I want to write TV more than movies. Sure. I'm just one of the many, many hopeful. Still. You'd think my obvious misogyny would have caught the attention of Jeff Robinov and he could have let the folks running the TV Writers' Workshop know that I was one of them!

Technically, I've not been rejected yet. However, I think the fact that I did not receive my written notification by today's deadline - for the semi-finalist interviews this Wednesday through Friday - is a good indicator. Ah well. There's always Disney-ABC. And next year. And the year after.

Disco depression

Feeling so fruity,
Spinning mp3s of what?
Jimmy Somerville

The Last King of Langley Falls

Sunday was not a good day. See below if you're unclear as to why. The pressure on my heart wasn't even much raised by the Yankees' win in the Bronx. I hoped that Sunday night's shows might elevate my mood a bit, but either I was too depressed, or both Family Guy and American Dad were off this week.

The only solace? Forest Whitaker spoofing his great run as Lt. Kavanaugh on The Shield as an IAD investigator for the Langley Falls Parking Bureau. All that was missing? Asking Stan if he wanted some gum.

Also, I was reminded of the greatest line in the history of television by Whitaker's presence:

Vic Mackey: "...your wife's pussy tastes like sweet butter."

Goodbye, Trouble

My cat died this weekend. She's been on the downside for a few months now - not eating, sleeping on the shower floor, using the house as her litter box on occasion - so it wasn't completely unexpected. It was completely heartrending, though.

We're in the middle of what feel like massive renovations on the house. In reality, we just put in a new patio door and are replacing the floors through most of the house, but to get to that point we've had to move much of our furniture out to the garage, rip up baseboards and door casings, and paint several rooms. We're going to remodel the guest bath as soon as the floor is complete, so that's undergoing demo right now as well. Then, we'll be out of the house for two weeks while the floor is installed.

All the above turmoil and displacement would have been too much for Trouble, so she got moved to my in-laws house a few weeks back. The dog, she can suffer through a kennel (especially the one with private room and private patio that we've picked for her) for two weeks and barely notices the mayhem going on right now. The cat, she was much more fragile. Also, after eight years of putting up with an Australian Shepherd who believed she and the cat were fast friends, we thought it might be nice for Trouble to live somewhere very quiet.

And for one week she really seemed to like it. Then we visited her and she wasn't the same again. Ever. I guess she figured she was on vacation and was ready to come home. When we left here there, she must have felt abandoned. She stopped eating, stopped coming out, and finally passed away.

I was sitting in my recliner Sunday morning, catching up on some of this week's comic books, when I heard the wife in the other room play a message on the answering machine. It's around two corners and hard to hear from where I sat, so I don't know if the call came early Sunday morning while we still slept, or Saturday evening while we were out. I do know I heard my mother-in-law's voice, though not the words. I stopped reading and strained to hear. I guess I knew.

I still don't know if Trouble died on Saturday or Sunday. I haven't been able to ask.

We drove over to pick up the cat and her things. There was no reason to add that burden to the in-laws; they already feel responsible for Trouble's death. It won't matter how many times we say no, they'll remain convinced it was their fault. My father-in-law had wrapped the cat in her towel (smells like home) and laid her out in the garage with the rest of her belongings. I opened the towel enough to see one of her ears, but no more. I couldn't bear it. I apologized as I stroked her ear one last time. Told her she's a good cat.

On the ride to the vet, the wife asked if I thought Trouble was in cat heaven. Since I don't believe in god or devil, heaven or hell, she knew the answer. I don't know if my wife ever realized before how much harder it is for me. I have no comfort: no heavenly streams of tuna-flavored water; no dancing fireflies; no pools of milk stocked with Corn Pops; no one to scratch her neck really hard, in that one spot she liked. Her soul, her essence, won't come back in a lamb or lion. She won't prowl the savanna in her sleep anymore. She won't pace the bathroom counter looking for attention while I'm brushing my teeth. She won't.

There is much more I could say, but no more I need to. I loved my cat, despite her short-comings. I wish she'd lived a better life than the one she backed into. She moved far too often, had an unwanted sister far too long, and lost the confidence and pride of her youth far too soon. I wish I'd been with her when she died, for no other reason than to hold her in my lap and stroke her one last time. I hate that she died feeling abandoned and I hate that after eight years of hiding cat, chasing dog I wanted to abandon her to the in-laws.

I killed my cat, as surely as I drained her joy and confidence by keeping her indoors. I killed her by leaving her and I'll never get to tell her I'm sorry.

He could play Cadet Castillo in Miami Vice Academy

Thankfully, SciFi isn't going to make me watch their abysmal Flash Gordon (even the cover of Queen's great song sucks in this version) to see the webisodes leading up to Razor. In the first episode, up this week, we meet rookie Viper pilot William "Husker" Adama.

Holy shit they cast well. He's got Edward James Olmos's heavily pockmarked face and still could pass as Jamie Bamber's brother. I am so looking forward to this flick - Yay! Miranda Fucking Zero^*!!! - and this final season of BSG it's a little sad. I'm like a kid, counting down the days until Hanukkah Harry brings me tube socks.

For those of you who don't know, I had an opportunity to read the screenplay for Ron Moore's series finale to BSG. How, I'll never say. But it was shocking and brilliant and broke my heart a little bit. Personally, I'd be a whole lot happier if I didn't already know how it all ends, but it's too late to un-know it.

Surprisingly, some friends wanted the mystery ruined for them, so I transcribed the final scene. There's a link to it in the sidebar, but for the feed fans, here's a direct link. Don't blame me after you read it if I've ruined BSG for you. It's your choice to read it or not.

Regardless, Razor is coming to SciFi November 24.

---

^* If you haven't seen the Global Frequency pilot, good on you. You aren't one a them thar internetty pirates, yarrr! Of course, you're also a damn fool. I would help you out on this, but of course *I* have never seen the pilot. I'd also suggest picking up Warren Ellis's original GF comics. You can get them in two volumes: Global Frequency Vol. 1: Planet Ablaze; and Global Frequency Vol. 2: Detonation Radio

Back to Blogger comments

I've decided to turn off ID comments for now. There are a lot of things I like about their system, but there are several aspects that I don't. First and foremost, unless and until they have broad adoption rates, the only major benefit the system provides is threaded comments. Some of the features that don't work without deep market penetration:

• Reputation. It seems simple and obvious that high reputation rates as measured by the community should equate to either high reliability or high relevance. During the beta, people are rarely taking advantage of the rating system to up- or down-vote ID members. That means frequency of commenting regardless of relevance/coherence is the determinant. If beta testers aren't voting, it's a near-certainty that late-adopters won't.
  
• As a follow-up point on reputation, the majority of ID beta sites/testers (at least those who comment frequently) have politics to the right of Rush. In that echo chamber of inanities, there's nowhere for me to comment without engaging in flame wars with the illuminutty. And again, because each comment posted increases reputation (unless the comment is voted down and see point 1 re: no voting) there's a very Freeper-feel to ID. It's unintentional, as technology has no bias, but still disconcerting to read a stream of moronic comments going by whenever I check ID's home page for activity.
• The beta is either still really limited, or the testers aren't hammering very much. That "stream of moronic comments" I mentioned is more a very slow drip.
• People don't want to sign up. Even my one or two semi-regular commenters here are reluctant (understandably) to sign up for YACS (yet another commenting system.) Who could blame them? I have more accounts, passwords, and ids spread about the web than a Mossad agent in the '70s. Without widespread adoption, no one is compelled to get an account. If people remain anonymous, they miss out on many of the features, sure, but they also negatively impact the community.

Beyond the problems associated with adoption rates, there are a few outstanding issues:

• Display gets wonky with deeply nested comments. This is a pretty big deal for a system that uses nesting of comments as one of its biggest selling features.
• The comment editor is pretty primitive. Formatting isn't supported yet (will be really soon, I suspect,) resizing of the edit pane isn't supported, and there's no comment preview.
• While I can delete comments on my blogs, I can't delete the comments I leave elsewhere. I understand the theory behind this, as it has to do with reputation, but with no comment preview, they really should provide comment deletion.

And finally, there is the biggest problem of all which can't be resolved: they run as an Ajax widget. That means: problems for those who have scripting off; problems for browsers with poor Javascript support; and problems like the one my new blogfriend had the other day. She can't comment from her work computer into ID. Somehow (I suspect she clicked the Blogger comment link before ID's Javascript had rewritten it) she once managed to get into the old-style Blogger comment system. Interesting. Also interesting that ID (correctly) does NOT insert itself on posts that have comments in the old system. What that means, however, is that I've got one post from past week with old-style comments while the rest use ID!

That also led me to realize that if a user had Javascript support turned off, or clicked the Blogger link before ID rewrote it, or if ID were down for a period of time, and then entered a comment in the underlying comment system, it would hide any ID comments that might already exist! That's a pretty big and scary hole for ID, and I don't believe there's an easy solution to it. At best, they build support for importing comments from the underlying systems into ID and do so either at timed intervals, or as recipients of comment notifications. Pretty rough.

Now, while it may seem as if I'm bashing this software, I'm not. I'm really impressed with how well it works, how much functionality it has, and how smoothly it operates on different browsers, OSs, and blogging platforms. These guys have done a great job and continue to do so. I will be keeping my account with them and commenting on other ID sites from time to time (more so if some sites that don't make me shake my head in disbelief and disgust come on line.)

And who knows? Maybe they'll get that market penetration they need to achieve a critical mass of users and I'll go back up with ID comments.

Unspoiled after all these years

There's an adlink above, FeedReader!
Alright. I'm not actually suggesting you go out and buy the above collection. First of all, no amount of arm-twisting, cajoling, or bribery could ever make me believe Jayne Mansfield was anything but a very slight clone of the great Marilyn. Everyone wanted a blonde bombshell, but instead of finding one with a unique, original mien, the studios found poor mimics.

Despite Ms. Mansfield's shortcomings (not the least of which - inflicting Mariska Hargitay upon an unsuspecting world with an able assist from hubby Mickey) there is one movie of hers I've always loved. Loved despite her. Loved, because it stars one of the greatest, funniest, most talented comic actors to ever grace a screen, large or small. Sadly, that movie is still not available for individual sale (though it can be rented from Netflix, as I did.)

I love Tony Randall.

It's been probably 20 years since I've seen Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? I was pretty sure my memory of the film was not too colored by the years, but it was time to find out.

I moved Lover Boy to the top of my queue. It shipped the other day, but we had the final disc of Freaks and Geeks to finish, plus the second episodes of the new TV season to deal with. Tonight, after a very long week we popped it in.

Memory served me well.

The movie's dated in some ways, notably the odd trans-Atlantic accent of Betsy Drake's Jenny Wells and...well nothing else, really. Sure the movie is an artifact of its time and place, but its takes on fame, success, and love are as contemporary as the matching outfits of Rita Marlowe's poodle, Shamroy. Since it's a full-size French poodle, it's MUCH larger than today's stars like; however, it's otherwise treated the same as any modern purse rat dog.

There is one fundamental problem with the movie: watching it one can only fantasize about how Marilyn would have elevated the film beyond very good into transcendental. The original George Axelrod play was optioned by Fox (and then completely discarded and replaced with Frank Tashlin's screenplay) specifically to get Mansfield, but I can dream. Mansfield just didn't have charisma. Much like her daughter Mariska who sits at home polishing Lauren Graham's Emmy, momma Jayne was an inferior performer.

Fortunately, this movie is all Randall and he is transcendent. If your only exposure to Tony Randall is his excellent work on The Odd Couple, you owe it to yourself to see some of his earlier film work. Try Rock Hunter, or 7 Faces of Dr. Lao, or watch him play the sidekick in one of the Hudson/Day comedies.

Please, please let this week just END

My greatest achievement of the day? Coining the new term that's sure to be sweeping the nation anyday now: scair quotes. It may also be written as sc(air) quotes.

In case it's not clear, that's a combo term for air quotes and scare quotes. May be used thusly:

NRA Man1: Hilary Clinton wants to "protect" us and take away our guns.
Random Dude: Nice use of the scair quotes there, sparky.

What do you want from me? It's been a rough week.

Druze out in Space

Wow. This is a fascinating profile of a Druze working on his doctoral dissertation in Germany. A great piece about the fluidity of identity.

Samuel Schidem, one of the guides [in Berlin's Jewish Museum] for Hebrew-speaking groups, chose to do his job in such a way as to "remove visitors from their Israeliness and make them think a little differently." Schidem shakes up the Israelis' regular thought patterns through their attempts to guess and catalog his identity.

"Some of them think I'm Yemenite or Moroccan, or maybe that I come from South America. At the end of the tour someone always asks where I'm from and where I learned Hebrew. I say that I'm an Israeli. And then immediately I get, 'From where in Israel?' and I say, 'From Usfiya.' And then there's a bit of shock, and right after that they get all excited. But I don't tell them at the beginning, because then they wouldn't listen to me the same way during the tour."