My Kind of Musical

A perky blonde and some sweet tunes. Stick 'The Sound of Music' where Maria would never dream of putting it. This is my kind of musical.

See more Kristin Chenoweth videos at Funny or Die

Unexpected Awesomeness

Spotted standing on a corner downtown today at 3:42 p.m.

A young woman, late teens, early twenties.

Hair, originally blonde, dyed the colour of a rainbow.

Wearing a machine gun bullet belt.

Camouflage capris.

Dora The Explorer backpack on her back, with a Guitar Hero guitar neck sticking out of the back.

Look capped off with giant anime sunglasses.

Somewhere, an Awesome Alarm is ringing.

Last Night, in Warcraft....

...my Night Elf kept a wary eye on a dragon. Because you know those guys? They're bastards.

Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Google 'Pushing Daisies'

...you come across this.

All About EVE

I still get a thrill when I see this...

Who Buries The Watchmen?

Well, this could cause a few geek hearts to beat a little faster.

Although I highly doubt Fox will demand that the film be taken out back and shot between the eyes, it does highlight the problems associated with any film based on the works of Alan Moore.

I've been fascinated with Mr. Moore for well over twenty years, and lately have been spending a fair amount of time reading whatever interviews and watching any YouTube videos I can find of him. The fact that he has worked almost every shit job I have (including cleaning toilets to put food on the table)is especially gratifying. Alan always followed his own path, and it's allowed him to become who he wants to be. And it also puts lots of food on his table and books on his shelves. He did the impossible.

What I find admirable about Moore is that he sees being a writer as being something of worth, especially in terms in keeping society healthy. With every writer scrounging to get a book deal, kissing up and scraping down in front of editors, to see someone like Alan is encouraging. While most writers would fall over themselves for a film deal, Moore shudders at the thought. You write books as a writer. You don't become a celebrity. You don't see yourself as anything other than what you are. He reminds me in many ways of my first writing hero, Harlan Ellison. Ellison took a no-bullshit approach to writing, and while he would probably howl at Moore's magical approach to writing as shamanism, their approach to the craft springs from the same roots of respect. (Ellison has had his own battles with Hollywood, especially over the Terminator series, which only illustrates the pure ego of certain Titanic directors.)

So I think of Alan as I sit here today, writing video game script. He'd probably chastise me for not working on my own projects, but right now, those projects aren't going to put new tires on the Cavalier. But it still makes me feel a bit better about the only thing I can do well.

But enough about that. Be interesting to see what happens with Watchmen, and whether the Curse of Alan will continue.

These So Called Vacations Will Soon Be My Death

Alone now in the Mansion of Broken Dreams, while Vulcan Ninja swings to work with those new grapple hooks she spent all weekend working on. I'm on my last week of vacation, which isn't really a vacation, since I've got the mother of all deadlines staring me in the face like a chihuahua with a Howitzer. So The Plan was to get to work this week and get things done.

So of course I stay up until three a.m. last night playing XBox Live.

This probably wasn't the best time to get that. In fact, I'm sure it wasn't. But I'm still in the early crush stage of playing GTA IV Deathmatch online, and still whoop and run around the yard at midnight when I go up a whole level in my shootiness, and thus get to choose a brand new backwards baseball cap to wear. The chat over the headphones has been more or less amusing, once you filter out all the white boys pretending to be hardcore street bangers. Last night, for example, we all sang 'Handlebars' while we shot each other, then did Mario impersonations, then ended the carnage by wishing each other a good night.

Vulcan Ninja seems cool about it, in both senses of the word. She looks at me when I suddenly let loose a stream of invective, and when I have a conversation to which she can only hear my side of it. I've also learned that you really shouldn't try and tell your wife about all the jokes, since I'm a guy who laughs at things that most men and women in their early forties stopped finding funny in 1986. I've found it's best to just take off the headset, put it away, then ask her if she'd like a top up on her wine.

The reason I like it? It reminds me very much of lunchtable chatter back in high school: 90 percent bullshit, with some very funny lines arising from the morass. Sure, there are some douchebags online, but the silence that greets them has shut many of them up. That, and being kicked from the game. I'm sure like all things in life the glow will fade, but right now, I am enjoying me the online.



Right. Back to work. Will not watch Generation Kill. Will do work. Yes, I will.

Did Star Wars End in 1980?

So, apparently, The Clone Wars isn't that good. I've seen some reviews that merrily describe it as a 'stellar flop'. Get it? Playing with the whole star thing? Clever!

So I was wandering around downtown today, listening to Ladytron and thinking about Star Wars, because that's the sort of mad way I spend my Friday afternoons. That, and not walking into the drunks staggering out of the serious drinkin' bars to have a smoke.

And it came to me that it's all been downhill since The Empire Strikes Back, really. As much as Star Wars has crawled into my subconscious since the age of 12, I really haven't been totally crazy about any of the movies since then.

The rescue of Han from Jabba in Return? I still enjoy that, even if it looks incredibly clumsy, and even the lamest Padewan with shitty diapers and a runny nose from the first trilogy could kick Luke's ass from here to Naboo. But once the Ewoks arrive, I generally pop the DVD out.

The Phantom Menace has a nice end lightsaber fight, but the rest is embarrassing. I enjoy aspects ofAttack of the Clones ( the fight between Obi-Wan and Poppa Fett, the battle on Geonosis), but those same aspects seem to be parts of other films, another Star Wars film made in another dimension, one where all the films had a sense of realism and better writing. The mythology hinted at in Attack and Revenge were also enough to attract my geek curiosity, but the tragedies of these films--namely, that Ewan McGregor and Natalie Portman were badgered into giving the worst performances of their lives, especially when you can see McGregor doing his best to make Obi-Wan a person and not a plot point--overshadow that small joy.

I did fall in love with the first batch of Clone Wars cartoons, , but that ended with a new team doing the movie. (Mace Windu taking out an entire army? Fucking right he can. Which makes his death in Revenge ridiculous. He's not dead, just you wait, there's a novel coming, I know there is...)

Which makes me think Empire was as good as it would ever get. Here, the glee and optimism of the first film was given a firm backhand. Now, we saw how dangerous this new galaxy could be. How there was loss among the victory, that there was a cost to everything. The sheer size of the threat to our heroes made us realize that things had changed, that the story we'd fallen in love with had a necessary dark side. With a downbeat ending, we as young viewers realized that things had changed. And in doing so, both the series--and we as viewers--grew.

But that's as far as it went. It was fun and games again in Return. Yeah, there was some drama, but everyone got to dance in the end with teddy bears, so how bad was it, really?

Even with the second trilogy, which dealt with how a bright star can turn so dark, with a story that you would think would be more mature, even that somehow became muddled. I'm fully down with Anakin becoming all Darky Side out of a need to protect--and thus control--his loved ones. Yet in the process, Anakin suddenly stops thinking, and ignores the advice of his most trusted father figure to follow easily the slimiest guy around. Anakin isn't stupid--he survived slavery, after all, and growing up in the shithole of Tatooine, you'd think he would have developed some street smarts. Or that that the Jedi would have had a How To Recognize A Scumbag class. But no--to actually show Anakin realistically darken, crippled by his fears of loss of his wife after losing his mother, is ignored. Instead, a complete character rewrite is thrown in like a switch was flipped--or as quickly as it takes to put on red contacts.

Which is perhaps the most frustrating thing about the second Star Wars trilogy. There is the feeling that there is something there, that there is a story wanting to get out. Matthew Stover did a much better job of showing that in his novelization of the film, and to be fair, many of the Star Wars novelists seem to get what the series should be about moreso than those at Skywalker Ranch. Perhaps it's because they're actual writers.

Just like Leigh Brackett, who co-wrote Empire. Funny, that...

It's The Tuesday Sing A Long!

I recommend singing this at work. It makes the day more interesting...

How To Spend A Sunday Afternoon

The evil feline sleep spell, woven once again...

Live At Last

That madman over at Jim Dandy Goodness has been secretly trying to help me achieve the nigh impossible--which was to convince my XBox to log onto XBox Live. We've had RL London Dork Blogger team-ups and everything. I'm well aware with all of my deadlines and encroaching mortality that I should be more focused on other things, but that's the way I am: I tend to throw myself at problems until I get my way. In many cases, this ends with me bleeding and with a truck grill imprinted on my forehead, but now and again, once every blue moon of cliche, things work.

So I'm now on XBox Live. This means I get to compete with all of the XBox gamers out there in games like Grand Theft Auto. And so far, it's been quite a bit of hellacious fun. Even with every other gamertag being some drunken bastardization of hip hop culture (Ghostfacekillaz32, bstyoup33), even with the other players slurrily proclaiming how much weed they've smoked that night and they can still kick my ass, motherfucker, and even with how incompetent I seem to be at the simplest of virtual tasks, I'm enjoying myself.

In GTA, I made my online character, using my favourite character from The Wire as a baseline:



That's my beloved Kima, hardass extraordainaire.


Live offers you two modes of online play: a 'fun' version, or a 'ranked' version. 'Fun' carries no stats with it, and is a good place to learn how to play the game in question before moving onto the big boys up in 'ranked'. Since I have no patience, I immediately started playing 'ranked' games. Fuck it, I thought. Start the failure early!

So last night, I played GTA until one a.m., cheerfully being blown up by rocket launchers, hearing other players howl at me as they ran me over. I was killed 21 times, but managed to plug three other players. There was joy at that. I had made progress on the leaderboards! My life wasn't a complete failure!

I also am trying to progress on Geometry Wars 2: Retro Evolved, a game that keeps pulling me in for hour after lost hour.



This is a game where panic moves in roughly thirty two seconds after you start playing. You either achieve some sort of Zen approach, or you pee your pants, cry for mommy, and hope you can survive just another three seconds. Guess how I play?

Sadly, some people feel compelled to keep lording their high scores over me. You'd think with a new baby at home he'd put the game controller down until I beat him at something....

Jenny Agutter-icity

Ever have one of those creepy moments when you have this horrible, disquieting feeling that the universe is totally punking you? That it has a plan, and it involves just freaking you out?

Freaking you out....with Jenny Agutter?

I was sitting reading a very good--yet very dorky--examination of the Pat Troughton era of Doctor Who, because I'm sad, middle aged and unloved. Since the book is aimed at my target audience--meaning it works in obscure pop culture references and tends to go on about things most people don't give what scientists like to refer to as a 'flying fuck' about--it often ends up in areas completely unexpected. Like mentioning The Railway Children, a 1970s film based on the works of E. Nesbitt and starring....Jenny Agutter.

For the next three seconds, I remembered the first time I saw Ms. Agutter. She made me feel rather funny in Logan's Run. The scene where she appears in Michael York's living room, because she's essentially put herself on the market for a night of naughtiness? I wasn't sure why this scene so fascinated me, but things would become clearer in a few years. Time passed, and then I came across her in this.

To waste bandwidth explaining the impact Ms. Agutter's portrayal of a British nurse had on the fevered imaginations of young teenage boys worldwide would be to overstate the obvious.

So then I continued to read. And then I looked up at the TV screen. Where The Eagle Has Landed was playing. A film I've never seen, and why not now? And then...there's Jenny Agutter. Playing some spitfire, up against Donald Sutherland, who occasionally remembers that he's supposed to have an Irish accent.

At that point, I raised my coffee to the Universe and said, "Nice one."