March 2005 Archives

Things are about to get a little hectic for the next two weeks (for generally positive reasons), so I'm probably not going to be updating Yankee Fog until April 15 or so. (For my UK readers, that's 15 April.)

No doubt you have often considered donning spandex tights and leaping across the rooftops of your city, defeating the evil and rescuing the innocent. Equally doubtlessly, the only thing holding you back has been certain practical questions. How will you keep your secret identity secret? Where can you recruit a sidekick and, more importantly, an arch enemy? And when you build your gleaming high tech headquarters, what zoning regulations must you follow?

Fear not, citizen crimefighters. Help is at hand, and it will be published by Andrews McMeel in September or October of this year.

Oh, and also, I wrote it, with my friend Matthew.

Here's a look at the preliminary design for the front cover (which may change slightly between now and publication):

UPDATE: The Government Manual for New Superheroes is now available for pre-order at Amazon.com.

There's an article up at the BBC about The Whitechapel Whirlwind, the opera that I'm writing the libretto for. My only quibble with the article is that it gives the impression that the whole opera will be performed next Tuesday; in fact, it will just be excerpts. Still, I think the article gives a good sense of who Jack "Kid" Berg was, and why he's a worthy subject for the world's first opera about boxing.

I have stumbled across what may be the best quote ever from an actual press release by a United States Senator.

"I am very concerned about [the] Spidey-Signal’s potential impact on our environment..."

That's Representative Diane Watson speaking.

Now, maybe she just wants to lock up J. Jonah Jameson's endorsement her next election cycle. Or maybe I'm taking her quote entirely out of context.

But maybe--just maybe--she's actually the Green Goblin.

If you want to be inspired to do great things, stop by Things Other People Accomplished When They Were Your Age and see what great people had accomplished long before they reached your age.

And if you want to be inspired to put off doing great things, look at what people accomplished when they were older than you. Neil Armstrong didn't even set foot on the moon until he was 39. Heimlich didn't invent his famous maneuver until he was 54.

And did you know Michaelangelo didn't even start working on the Sistine Chapel until he was 33? What a slacker. By the time I had turned 33, I had already visited the completely finished Sistine Chapel.

A piece I wrote is now up at The New Republic's website. It's called OutFlanked, and it takes a look at what we can expect now that there's pro-life Democrat running for the Senate. (Free registration is required before you can read the article.)

I just saw a very pointed political ad. It points out that the projected budget surplus in 2000 was $2.2 trillion, adding, "That's $8000 for every American." But--the ad warns--a president who is willing to squander the surplus and create a deficit puts America's economy in danger.

The ad was from 2000, of course, and the spendthrift America was being warned about was Al Gore. The thrifty fiscal conservative who could be trusted not to blow through $2.2 trillion was George W. Bush.

Ah, the good old days.

Predicting the future is a dangerous business.

I'm reading Emergence, by Steven Johnson, which was published in the heady and optimistic era of 2001. Much of it holds up. But then you come to a passage like the following, which describes what TV watching will be like in the magical, futuristic world of 2005:

The entertainment world will self-organize into clusters of shared interest, created by software that tracks usage patterns and collates consumer ratings. These clusters will be the television networks and the record labels of the twenty-first century. The HBOs and Interscopes will continue to make entertainment products and profit from them, but when consumers tune in to the 2005 equivalent of The Sopranos, they won't be tuning in to HBO to see what's on. They'll be tuning in to the "Mafia stories" cluster," or the "suburban drama" cluster, or even "James Gandolfini fan club" cluster. All these groups--and countless others--will point back to The Sopranos episode, and HBO will profit from creating as large an audience as possible. But the prominence of HBO itself will diminish: the network that actually serves up the content will become increasingly like the production companies that create the shows--a behind-the-scenes entity, familiar enough to media insiders, but not a recognized consumer brand.

Sometimes, people recording their voices on their home computers accidentally make the recording available via Kazaa or other file-sharing network. And sometimes, a mischievous composer known as Stark Effect remixes those recordings into songs for a project called Mic In Track. The results can be incredibly catchy, surprisingly wistful, or just sweet.

Stark Effect's work can also be found at Dictionaraoke, where remixers use online dictionaries to sing classic songs. I don't know why it's so funny to hear a computer sing like John Lee Hooker or Astrud Gilberto, but it just is.

In fact, the only thing that's better is stopping by The Party Party and hearing George W. Bush singing "Imagine" or rapping like madman. (Warning: that last link is NSFW. The President is surprisingly pottymouthed.)

Parts of this post originally posted on Monkeyfilter

This Godzilla-themed wedding decoration is pretty cool, especially if they carried the theme through by poorly lip-synching their vows.

The New York Press's helpful guide on How Not To Fake Your Own Death. Via Monkeyfilter

The British film industry is having a barn raising!

Well, actually, more like a roof raising.

The British Academy of Film and Television Arts--aka BAFTA--is holding a few dozen eBay auctions to generate money for its "Raise The Roof" fund (which helps pay for some much-needed repairs of BAFTA's building.) Although most of the items are out of my range, it's fun to browse the list. At the moment, the most expensive item is an authentic "Wanted: Sirius Black" poster from the set of the latest Harry Potter film. If you have a extra £922 (about $1750) to spare for the young Harry Potter fan in your life, then come next Christmas, you can be the coolest aunt/uncle/mom/dad/grandparent ever. (Unless you end up shattering their innocence when they discover that it doesn't actually move like it does in the film.)

If, however, your niece is a young single woman, maybe she'd rather cozy up to the sweater Colin Firth wore when he plunged into the lake in Love, Actually.Or perhaps she'd prefer Paul Bettany's tennis racket from Wimbledon, or the cashmere scarf that Liam Neeson wore to the 1996 Oscars. For anybody keeping score, Firth's sweater is currently at £225; Neeson's scarf is £30.85; and Bettany's tennis racket is £26.75. The final sales price of these items will, at long last, provide a scientific demonstration of the relative sexiness of each of these three men.

Personally, I covet the signed Wallace & Gromit watercolour painted by Nick Park.

You may recall that, shortly before the Oscars, I feebly attempted to make a bit of comedic hay over the film names Before Sunset and After The Sunrise. I knew there was a joke in there somewhere, and I grasped for it valiantly, but, with hindsight, I clearly wasn't able to find it.

Fortunately for the world, Chris Gaveler was.

This week's Time Out: London is devoted to tea. The highlight is an essay on the history of tea in London, written by Roy Moxham, author of Tea: Addiction, Exploitation, and Empire. When the beverage had its first real surge of popularity in London, Moxham says...

There was impassioned debate about whether it was good or bad for the health. Perhaps the most venomous attack on tea ever written came in 1757, from noted philanthropist Jonas Hanway in An Essay On Tea Considered as Pernicious to Health, Obstructing Industry, and Improverishing the Nation:"To what a height of folly must a nation be arrived, when common people are not satisfied with wholesome food at home, but must go to the remotest regions to please a vicious palate! There is a certain lane near Richmond, where beggars are often seen, in the summer season, drinking their tea.... He who should be able to drive three Frenchmen before him, or she who might be a breeder of such a race of men, are to be seen sipping tea! ...Were they the sons of tea-sippers, who won the fields of Cressy and Agincourt, or dyed the Danube's streams with Gallic blood?"