I was gonna do a sarcastic thing about Sally Kern blaming economic strife on teh gays, but Karen beat me to it.

Bitch is crazy.

After tonight’s SYTYCD elimination, I went over to Television Without Pity’s forums, mostly because I am a masochist. In between the usual ranting about how Philipchbeeb is ruining the show for them and so forth, I also found the usual bevy of conspiracy theories. Melissa is older than 30 because she has lines on her face! They are manipulating the Bottom Three couples so that people’s votes don’t matter! And so forth. (These complaints are always trotted out for American Idol as well, but I don’t care about Idol so I can let them go.)

I would just like to make it clear: these people are full of crap. I mean, they are full of crap on the level of the guy at that party who tells you that Kentucky Fried Chicken changed their name to KFC because they weren’t legally allowed to call it “chicken” any more, because they invented centipede-chickens with ten drumsticks apiece. They are graduates of the School Of Somebody Told Me.

How do I know they are full of crap? Because 19 Entertainment and Fox have created a happy fun television show that A) invites contestants to compete for a large cash prize, and B) invites the public to vote, at cost, to determine winners. In the case of both groups, the contestants, the show is therefore responsible to them to present the rules of the show publicly and openly, and to abide by those rules. Were the producers to not do this, then they would be liable to both groups; any contestants who felt slighted would be able to sue for the “loss of a chance,” which is well-established in contract law as potential grounds for a suit. There would similarly be grounds for a class action lawsuit on the public’s behalf.

This is why every episode ends with a disclaimer in small print admitting that the show’s producers might just possibly monkey around with partner selection and dance selection as they see fit. (I snark about non-random dance selection as much as anybody else, but if they say the dances are randomly assigned, they’re either assigning them purely randomly, or assigning them randomly and then offering a “trade” option of some sort that the dancers can take advantage of if they wish, or something along those lines.) It’s all about liability.

Seriously, it’s a multimillion dollar television franchise. They’re not gonna kill the cash cow with something that stupid.

The Star Rovers struck an early blow for alternative lifestyles in comics.

See how Karel cheerfully grasps both Rick and Homer’s asses? This self-described “glamor girl” is in charge. You can tell by the look on her face. That is the face of a woman in total control, who understands and recognizes her power, and likes that she does. Nothing, she thinks - nay, she knows - is finer than the ass-cheek of a starfaring man who knows his place. Firm yet fleshy, that’s the ticket.

See how Rick is confident in his obviously bisexual swagger. As he sashays through the stars, seeing everything sapient - and a few choice lifeforms that technically aren’t - as something to nail, he is nothing less than the galactic predecessor of The Todd. Except Rick gets much, much more ass than The Todd. But what do you expect? He’s a playboy and an athlete. He’s filled every orifice he’s found in every sector of the galaxy.

And Homer - well, Homer’s getting on in years, so he’s really just grateful for whatever tender moments he can get.

And if you think I’m going too far with this, I’d suggest you read Twilight, Howard Chaykin’s re-imagining of the classic DC space comics - because really, I’m fairly conservative by comparison.

Top comment: I have read too many “re-imaginings” to ever be optimistic about another one. And Chaykin is not the man to change my mind. – Greg Morrow

Your judges tonight are Nigel, a surprisingly sane Mary, and a surprisingly non-bitchy Mia Michaels.

Carla and Turk Jeanette and Brandon: cha-cha. I got home a bit late and missed this, which was annoying for me. But everybody says it was really good and frankly I think it takes a freight train at this point to keep Jeanette and Brandon out of the top 10, so I figure they’re safe.

Kayla and Kupono: contemporary. The judges raved about this - they were in a really good mood all night - but honestly, it left me cold. Technically excellent, to be sure, but I didn’t get any feeling of connection between the two of them and Sonya’s “this is about a vampire and a dying girl” theme didn’t come through for me in the dancing at all. Kayla and Kupono are rapidly becoming two of my least favourite dancers on this show. (Which doesn’t make them bad. But I’m never excited to see them dance.)

Randi and Evan: Broadway. It’s refreshing to see a Broadway piece done by someone other than Tasty Oreo, but this felt awfully lacklustre - again, the judges were overgenerous - and given that Randi and Evan have been probably one of the least challenged couples on this show (a jazz dance, a jazzy contemporary piece, a Broadway, and a jive which was mediocre) it can only come as a disappointment. Which is a shame, because it was clear from the choreo that Joni whatsername had some really great ideas that Randi and Evan just didn’t execute.

Caitlyn and Jason: pop/jazz. Brian Friedman earns my admiration for choreographing pieces that aren’t about Boy And Girl In Love. Nigel earns my scorn for complaining that Caitlyn was overclothed - yeesh, Nigel, ease up on your dirty old man vibe for once, willya? Caitlyn and Jason did well enough here to potentially avoid bottom three - at least technically, I think their connection as a couple still isn’t there - but it was a strong week and they didn’t stand out enough to erase their previous lack of karma, so I think “potentially” isn’t good enough this week to actually manage the avoidance they want.

Jeanine and Philipchbeeb: hip-hop. Someone else somewhere on the internet called Napoleon and Tabitha’s choreo “contemporary with chest pumps,” and this was a good example of how their work can devolve that way; the actual choreo was lacklustre (and the idea of the chain was just stupid, nothing short of active sabotage towards the dancers and distracting to boot) and it relied on Philipchbeeb and Jeanine killing their hits to make it acceptable (and this week she was nearly as good as he was; I suspect he has been training her, and she him). This was fine and should keep them safe.

ASIDE: I am getting really sick of the contempo-snobs on the Television Without Pity forums complaining that it is “time for Philip to go” when he’s been in three good-to-great routines, which at a minimum outpaces Kupono, Vitolio and Jason (none of whom, incidentally, have even half of Philipchbeeb’s charm and performance quality), and when he is the only non-classically-trained male dancer left on the goddamned show (and one of only two left on the entire program). He’s danced out of his wheelhouse twice and had one solid outing and one bad miss, which is about par for most of the dancers on the show (other than Brandon and Jeanette, who have barely danced in their own styles and have been murdering everything in sight). So shut up, TWOP forum people.

Melissa and Ade: pas de deux. Wow, this sure was a good way to completely destroy whatever illusion was left that the routines aren’t pre-selected for dancers. But it was very nice. Ade wasn’t quite as solid as the judges claimed, but he was good enough, and of course Melissa was excellent what with actually being a ballerina and all. (While we are discussing dancers working out-of-style: Melissa and Ade have only left their comfort zone once, for a rumba which, while excellent, was hardly a staggering digression from their classically trained background like salsa or quickstep would have been.)

Karla and Vitolio: quickstep. The judges bent over backwards to pretend that this was great. It was at best okay. Vitolio’s footwork, particularly in some of the promenades, was laboured; Karla’s parts when she wasn’t dancing in hold were overly jazzy; and both dancers just generally lacked that lovely dreamy bounce quality that good quickstep has. The two of them have good chemistry and probably would have made a better pairing right from the start, as opposed to their mostly dead-wood partners; unfortunately I think the new pairing is a case of too little too late.

Probable bottom three: Karla and Vitolio, Jason and Caitlyn, Randi and Evan.
Should go home: Karla and Vitolio.
Will go home: Karla and Jason.

CB: “Why I should direct X.” Ha! Loopholes!

It’s funny, because I’ve completed four feature-length screenplays. (Two of which are actually reasonably good. The old adage that everybody has to write at least one shit screenplay before they can write a good one is too generous by half, in my case literally.) But I’ve been notoriously unlucky in Hollywood beating me to the punch.

Fadeaway, for example, was a story about an assassin trying to kill the President of the United States - with the ability to teleport, which he got as a result of an illegal dark-sector government lab experiment. It was basically written around three or four set-pieces using the teleportation to best cinematic effect. Then Bryan Singer includes the “Nightcrawler invades the White House” sequence in X2 and there’s a screenplay that basically becomes obsolete (or at least perceived as a ripoff too greatly to be made for a couple decades) overnight.

More recently, Midnight Men, the story about a world where vampires took over, and which has been a side project I return to whenever I get stalled on something else (it’s about 60 percent done at this point), is now completely unmakeable thanks to Daybreakers, which seriously looks to use maybe eighty-five percent of my story beats. Admittedly, in mine the vampire world was self-sustaining as a result of blood cloning factories, the human resistance operated entirely in secret, and the death of the vampire race was essentially long-term and built-in rather than a scarcity of food supply, but the basic story beats are all there. Which, on the one hand it’s nice that somebody liked the same ideas I liked well enough to get a budget (and come on, Daybreakers looks pretty cool), but on the other hand it’s still annoying.

And of course there’s Al’Rashad, the pseudo-Arabic-meets-Vikingish fantasy epic that was four-fifths finished - on September 10, 2001. (I finished it anyway, but knew it wouldn’t be filmable for years. I need to go back and fix up some parts at some point; looking back at it, you can see where it’s still rough. I wasn’t nearly as seasoned a writer then. Or maybe I’ll turn it into a comic or novel at some point - but it would need reworking. I was really in a visual place for it.)

Anyway, this is getting away from the actual question of “why I should direct X,” but most existing properties I don’t have any interest in making or have already been done. The only existing properties I’d still consider tackling as a writer/director¹ are Green Lantern, The Prisoner, and Small Gods by Terry Pratchett (maybe Good Omens, but there is always talk about Terry Gilliam doing that one, and I would dearly love to see that). Besides, knowing that I’m capable of directing - because I’ve done it - is different from wanting to do it. The creative control is glorious; the on-set responsibility, onerous.

1. Because there’s a line of people asking me to do both jobs, you see. [↩]

A few comments from yesterday’s general blogrequest post were Canada-themed and today is Canada Day and all, so it seems appropriate.

Lurkerwithout: Why people who call Canada “socialist” are, you know, stupid

Well, they’re kind of not entirely wrong. They’re wrong to directly equate socialism with communism, which they do all the time. But the modern point of balance of government is between socialist impulses and capitalistic ones, and Canadian society is certainly more socialist than the United States is. (Then again, most of the first world is more socialist than the United States is, but that is neither here nor there.)

But it is important to point out that officially, Canadian corporate tax rates are lower than American corporate tax rates. (Of course, unofficially there are so many loopholes in the American tax code that American-based corporations effectively pay barely any tax or often no tax at all.) The tax expense of being a Canadian citizen is not staggeringly higher than that of being an American citizen, and when you take into account that our taxes pay for most of our healthcare it’s probably about even.

But the counterpoint to the actual monetary argument is one of people’s attitude towards government. Canadians may gripe, but in the end we genuinely like government services and there is a general cultural attitude of being willing to pay taxes for those government services. Certainly we’d like to pay less, generally speaking, but there’s a difference between wanting to save money and the American anti-tax attitude that treats taxation as nothing more than theft.

So there’s that.

Canadave: I’d be interested to know what you think Canadian TV needs to do to in order to become\stay interesting and\or relevant.

Honestly, this is kind of a gimme question, because right now I think Canadian teevee is mostly already doing the right things: creating lower-than-American-budget television shows with pre-guaranteed markets (Canadian and American networks) that are of decent quality. I may not like The Listener or Flashpoint, but that’s because I watched them and decided they were just not my thing; it wasn’t because they were bad shows.

Would it be better if the Canadian television industry wasn’t one that over-relied on simulcasts of American shows with Canadian commercials and re-airs of old American content? Yes, undeniably. It wouldn’t be hard, either. Just limit a channel to, oh, fifteen hours a week of prime-time American shows. Even in the heyday of the old traditional “fall season” format of television, this would have only amounted to nine hours of Canadian shows in prime-time per week, which isn’t onerous to achieve (and a fifteen hour cap would have let Canadian networks air all of their most popular American shows, easy - you miss out on re-airing According to Jim, oh darn).

But given the refusal of the CRTC to make Canadian networks do anything that might make them cry bitter tears, I think things are about as good as they can be right now.

Bunnyofdoom: Your thoughts/feelings on being Canadian and what it means to you, and/or your idea of what Canadian Identity is.

You know, it’s funny, because whenever somebody asks me this question I always think of that episode of Friends where Phoebe is blathering on about past lives, and Joey gets worried because he thinks he doesn’t have one, so she responds, “Oh no, sweetie! You’re brand new!” Which is weird both because Canada is 140ish years old now and because I’m flashing to friggin’ Lisa Kudrow on a question about Canadian identity, but nobody ever claimed that I don’t have issues.

But I think of that because Canadians don’t have an identity in the way that the French do, for example. “Polite, friendly and considerate” is a nice stereotype to have, I suppose, but A) it’s a little overblown and B) just about everybody is polite and friendly.¹ Germans might be humourless, but they’re polite and friendly about not laughing at your jokes. Italians might sleep with your wife, but they will be polite and friendly about it. And so forth.

We’re still a young country, and unlike America, which was born in the sort of circumstance which immediately invents a national character, we were essentially created out of compromise and convenience. “Polite and friendly” is the sort of stereotype that gets invented in the absence of a national character. It’s like a default precisely because it’s so bland and inoffensive.

So we’re essentially a country in search of a national character. There are some appealing options beyond “we like hockey,” and one of the reasons I’m a member of the New Democrats (much as it pains me to admit it) is that I think the NDP provide the best opportunity to expand upon our instinctive search for a national character in ways that I approve of. (The Tories have their own ideas, which I disagree with. The Liberals like bland and inoffensive.)

1. Except the French, and possibly the Koreans. [↩]

I always like to throw one of these out from time to time and give readers the chance to request something particular. I never guarantee anything, but usually there’s a few things I end up wanting to write about thrown into the mix. (No “I should write X” requests. I do those on my own clock.) So go nuts, folks.

Meandering opening with only circumstantial connection to actual meat of post, containing one of

A) too many nothing connector words for folksy emphasis
B) multiple obscenities
C) a quote from either The Princess Bride or The Adventures of Baron Munchausen
D) all of the above.

Secondary paragraph, expanding on opening paragraph so that reader understands what post is actually about. Show of consternation or possibly enthusiasm, this latter only in rare circumstances. Additional pop-culture reference, made obliquely. Additional obscenities. Hyperlinks.

If subject of post nerdy, joke made at Geoff Johns’ expense here. (One time in three, follow up joke with disclaimer stating critical admiration of some of Geoff Johns’ work, for purpose of balance.) If subject of post not nerdy, joke made at Michael Ignatieff or Stephen Harper’s expense here. (Disclaimer never necessary and never used.)

.jpg file, possibly animated.

Final portion of post, summing up argument in relatively cohesive fashion (if reader not legally trained) or in disorganized but charming mess (if reader legally trained). Obscenities. Possibly snappy turn of phrase. Obscenities.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Top comment: Why the heck DIDN’T they put Grimlock in the new movies? – Beacon

Because car companies aren’t manufacturing dinosaurs, I guess. – Evan Waters

LIKED

- Detective Comics featuring Batwoman was as good as everybody says it is, and frankly, given that it’s stupid boring sucky Batwoman, this is nothing short of a miracle even though Greg Rucka and J.H. Williams are the ones doing it. (Let me put it this way: regardless of how good a filmmaker Steven Spielberg might be, I would stll be skeptical if he said he was going to make a children’s adventure film about Benito Mussolini.) The Question backup feature is the first one of these backups that has really genuinely impressed. (The Blue Beetle one in Booster Gold was inconsequential fun and little more; the Renee story has meat to it.)

- The Philanthropist shouldn’t work - I mean, come on, the adventures of a billionaire? - but it does. A friend of mine called it “kind of like Iron Man without the armor,” and that’s pretty accurate. James Purefoy is really good in it, too, combining that Stark-like mix of insouciance, hedonism, stubbornness and genuine idealism to create a genuinely engaging lead character. Dunno if it can keep it up, but the pilot was a lot of fun.

DIDN’T LIKE

- Gotham City Sirens is crap. You know, for all the flak Marvel is (rightly) taking over their horribly sexist, amazingly tone-deaf comics like Marvel Divas and Models Inc., it’s worth remembering that DC is really only marginally better in this regard and is just as willing to shove out blatant T&A like this book, which is little more than an excuse to draw Poison Ivy, Harley Quinn and Catwoman in a variety of anatomically impossible “sexy” poses. (Additional note: I am really, really sick of hack writers coming up with a stupid villain concept and then telling the reader “hey this guy is stupid” and having everybody in the book beat him with ease. Remember back in the day when Spider-Man would fight a new villain every issue? Sure, some of them were silly in retrospect, but the writers back then made sure Spidey took every one of them damn seriously. Actually, one of the good things about the new “He’s Single And A Loser So He’s Spider-Man Again Just Like When I Was Six!” run is that they treat their new villains, even the ridiculous ones, as genuine threats.)

- I probably should have known better than to go see Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, but what are you gonna do when your date says she wants to see big robots fighting one another? (Answer: you go see the movie. It is possible some of you might not have known this. This is a basic truth regardless of the gender of you or your date.) Anyway, yes, it is as shit-awful as you might think. Michael Bay still thinks the mere utterance of a profanity constitutes a punchline. Michael Bay still doesn’t know how to make a fight scene between giant robots - something which should practically direct itself - visually coherent or interesting. Michael Bay still doesn’t know how to set up plot elements effectively or indeed tell a story. And really, saying “still doesn’t” isn’t entirely accurate, because in the last five years Michael Bay has made at least one genuinely entertaining film (The Island, which didn’t do well because the public is essentially stupid), so we know that he has some understanding of story; it’s just that when he makes a Transformers movie, he knows he doesn’t have to bother being good because, as the opening weekend revenues demonstrate, people will eat that shit up regardless of how shit the shit is.

Top comment: I think the best point in RotF was when John Turturro was lecturing the old robot about structuring his stories. – enlight_bystand

Do not push the big red button.

BATMAN: So I saw you fighting another giant robot on television. Luthor again?
SUPERMAN: No, this one wasn’t Luthor.
BATMAN: Are you sure?
SUPERMAN: Of course I’m sure. Why wouldn’t I be sure that it wasn’t Luthor?
BATMAN: You tend to believe the best of people too often. I want to be sure this wasn’t another case of “maybe he’s reformed this time.”
SUPERMAN: I’m telling you, it wasn’t Luthor. It was aliens.
BATMAN: Hn. Aliens.
SUPERMAN: What’s that supposed to mean?
BATMAN: Nothing. So what did the giant alien robot want?
SUPERMAN: No, the robot wasn’t itself an alien. It was built by aliens.
BATMAN: I understood that.
SUPERMAN: Oh.
BATMAN: The robot?
SUPERMAN: Oh. Enslave all humanity. You know.
BATMAN: Again? That’s the third one this year and it’s only May.
SUPERMAN: Actually, this one was kind of interesting. See, there used to be this intelligent alien race that lived on Earth before humans.
BATMAN: That we’ve never discovered any archelogical evidence of? Ever? Pull the other one, Clark.
SUPERMAN: No, really! They left.
BATMAN: They left.
SUPERMAN: Yes.
BATMAN: They left the most fertile planet in this entire quarter of the galaxy.
SUPERMAN: There was some virus or something and it was wiping them out.
BATMAN: They invented interstellar space travel and couldn’t figure out antibiotics or vaccination?
SUPERMAN: They didn’t invent faster-than-light space travel; they used hibernation ships.
BATMAN: Where did they go?
SUPERMAN: I’m not sure. They seem to have been lost.
BATMAN: Really.
SUPERMAN: It’s not entirely implausible, you know.
BATMAN: Hn.
SUPERMAN: I keep telling you, it wasn’t Luthor.
BATMAN: I’m sure. Continue.
SUPERMAN: Anyway, a few of them stayed behind and transferred their consciousnesses into the giant robot.
BATMAN: Does that mean when you destroyed the giant robot, you wiped out their race?
SUPERMAN: …well, there’s the ones in the hibernation ships.
BATMAN: That were lost.
SUPERMAN: …oh, crap.
BATMAN: (sighs) Look, they weren’t really alive anyway. They were computer copies of dead people.
SUPERMAN: Good point.
BATMAN: And it looked like that giant robot was giving you a hell of a fight.
SUPERMAN: It was. Battle lasers, nearly indestructible, that sort of thing. Hey, you know what was interesting?
BATMAN: No.
SUPERMAN: It would send out the alien spirits to possess people - wait. If the spirits were in the robot -
BATMAN: Probably advanced hypnosis of some kind. You didn’t kill anybody. It’s obvious.
SUPERMAN: Oh. Good. Anyway, whenever it sent out those “spirits” to possess people, it would get weaker. But when it recalled them, it got stronger.
BATMAN: That doesn’t make any sense.
SUPERMAN: Sure it does.
BATMAN: No, it doesn’t. If it was really recalling “spirits” back to its mainframe, it would be using up additional processing resources and therefore should have been getting weaker. Or at least slower.
SUPERMAN: But -
BATMAN: Come to think, freeing up processor space like it did by expelling “spirits” should have made it more efficient, but instead it got weaker. That confirms the hypnosis theory; it was running additional subroutines when it hypnotized people and “possessed” them.
SUPERMAN: Well -
BATMAN: So to sum up, you fought a giant battle robot that claimed to be made from an Earth-native intelligent race that conveniently managed to predate humanity and invent starship travel - but not moderately advanced medicine, despite their ability to supposedly digitally transfer souls into machinery - without leaving a single trace of their civilization behind for us to discover. Then it behaved in a manner contrary to all the laws of computing that we know, unless it’s completely consistent with those laws. And you barely managed to destroy it.
SUPERMAN: Well, that’s the thing, see.
BATMAN: …what?
SUPERMAN: I couldn’t quite destroy it by punching it or anything.
BATMAN: Why didn’t you just throw it into the sun?
SUPERMAN: …look, sometimes you forget these things in the heat of the moment.
BATMAN: So what did you do?
SUPERMAN: I pretended I was defeated and figured that if I left myself open for possession, they’d all try to possess me at once and bad things would happen.
BATMAN: You did what?
SUPERMAN: Well, it worked.
BATMAN: That’s the most idiotic thing I think you’ve ever done. Counting the whole glasses thing, which I still don’t believe works.
SUPERMAN: Well -
BATMAN: I’d tell you more at length how stupid it was, but it doesn’t matter since we know “they” weren’t trying to “possess” you.
SUPERMAN: Then what did the robot do?
BATMAN: My guess would be that it initiated a deep-core biological scan, transmitted the data, then self-destructed to disguise its true plan.
SUPERMAN: …
BATMAN: Yes.
SUPERMAN: Look, it’s still not necessarily Luthor…

(It’s still a really cool-looking battle robot, regardless of origin.)

Top comment: Wait, so it’s a robot made of thetans? Huh. – Master Mahan

STUPID WOMAN AT THE PRESS CONFERENCE THING: “Hey, my billion-year-old mother got a pacemaker five years ago and she’s still alive because of it even though the doctors said she was too old to get a pacemaker and didn’t want to do the surgery because she might not survive. What do you say to that, huh?”

OBAMA: “That your billion-year-old mother got fucking lucky, and it’s not my job to pay to make sure she has the chance to be fucking lucky.”

Your guest judge this week is Toni Basil, apparently because the producers felt the need to re-inflict upon us the worst guest judge ever.

Karla and Jonathan: hip-hop. I’m generally a big fan of Dave Scott’s choreography and I think I would have liked this routine if it wasn’t danced for crap: Jonathan was absolutely terrible in this, dancing what is quite possibly the whitest hip-hop on SYTYCD pretty much ever. Karla was much better, but unfortunately I don’t think she lived up to the standard of “oh hi I am a member of a top-flight hip-hop crew incidentally.” Jonathan was so painfully bad in this he made Karla look bad.

Asuka and Vitolio: jazz. Mandy Moore continues her endless quest to choreograph every single song that played at her high school prom with a lifeless, floppy, slow bland number that was just utter dogshit. Worse, it was utter dogshit that wasn’t danced very well by Asuka: her extensions on her leaps were painful to watch. Vitolio was better. That is all I have to say about this piece, which was terrible and worse forgettably terrible.

Melissa and Ade: rumba. Man, Ade was just on form tonight: he partnered Melissa very well indeed, pulling off the oft-difficult rumba combination of being both sensual and damn manly at the same time. Melissa was solid, although her hands were definitely in the crabby-hand mold that can distract sometimes. They bobbled one move (that slow assisted spin into the wrap) a little bit, but other than that this was pretty strong. They should be safe.

Carla and Turk Janette and Brandon: hip-hop. Brandon danced the motherfucking shit out of this. Seriously, Brandon hasn’t danced in his style once yet so far and he’s just nailing everything they give him. Janette was solid as well; not on Brandon’s level, but definitely at least coming up to meet him towards the end. It’s kind of depressing that this is only the second watchable hip-hop routine of the season when we’ve had six of them so far, but if nothing else this was definitely a highlight of the entire season.

Kayla and Kupono: Viennese waltz. Jean-Marc Genereaux excels at creating waltzes where the actual waltzing can be disguised under a layer of lyrical movement, and this was no exception. During the rare moments in the routine where Kayla and Kupono actually had to, you know, waltz, they were exposed for the non-ballroomers they were. But the sweeping lifts and poses that Jean-Marc put in to hide their mediocre waltzing more or less covered their asses. Reminiscent of the Kherington/Twitch waltz from last season, albeit not as good - Twitch was much better at partnering than Kupono is and it showed tonight. Even so, watchable.

Randi and Evan: contemporary. Mia Michaels dialing it down? What is happening to the world? Maybe this is Mia reacting to all the other choreographers doing more complex routines. “If they will do complex then I will do simple! I am MIA MICHAELS dammit!” But yeah, her Randi’s Ass Dance was charming and clever and entertaining and memorable in ways that a lot of her routines last season weren’t, and Evan and Randi danced it very well. Back to basics Mia: me like. (Also, Nigel deciding that the routine was about “an old man and a beautiful girl” is all sorts of friggin’ creepy. Don’t project your pathetic inner fantasy life onto the dancers, Nigel. Or at least don’t tell us that you’re doing that.)

Caitlyn and Jason: paso doble. This was all kinds of bad. Jason’s posture was much weaker than Mary allowed for, and worse yet he wasn’t even forceful. When he opened his mouth for those supposedly dramatic silent screams, he looked like somebody had stepped on his foot. Caitlyn was clumsy and totally lacking character and about as sultry as Betty White in a chador. Mary Murphy felt the need to reference their Bollywood routine again to explain how good they really were. Dear Mary: the Bollywood was only moderately good at best, and also it was two weeks ago. Get the fuck over it already. We do not need Bollywood to become the new Broadway.

Jeanine and Philipchbeeb: Broadway. Oh shit I said “Broadway” and then Tasty Oreo appeared! HE IS LIKE CANDYMAN! But now that I’ve said that I will retract my usual dislike of Tasty Oreo’s Broadway, because this routine was not his usual “How To Rip Off Bob Fosse In Thirty Seconds” junk but actually a pretty decent Gene Kelly homage. I think Philipchbeeb was poorly done by the introduction piece, because that “oh shit” jump (and it was definitely an “oh shit” jump) gets a little less impressive when you take out the surprise value and just make it about whether or not he can do it. Philipchbeeb also danced this far more acceptably than the judges gave him credit for doing; certainly he wasn’t as fluid as the jazzy style demands, but he adapted to this much better than anybody except Brandon and Jeanette did to hip-hop so far. Jeanine was excellent and I have no complaints, other than to point out that she did not look like “Betty Grable” but rather Bettie Page.

Bottom three predictions: Karla and Jonathan, Asuka and Vitolio, Caitlyn and Jason.
Should go home: Caitlyn and Jonathan.
Will go home: Karla and Jonathan.

Everybody has a couple dozen “times I nearly died.” Most of them are uninteresting. For example, this one time I was walking home, didn’t realize a light had just turned red, and nearly got hit by a bus. It missed me by about six inches. But so what? Everybody has a couple dozen stories like that. (Or is dead.)

But my good “time I nearly died” story is from when I was eleven. I have previously mentioned how, when I was a kid, our annual family vacation was two weeks at the Maine coast. Kennebunk, Ogunquit, Saco - but eventually it became Old Orchard Beach, every year like clockwork. Walt Disney World was often said to be “sometime in the future.” I have never yet been. Moral: parents will lie to you to preserve their twisted vision of your innocence.

But do not let the lack of Epcot bring you down: Old Orchard was a pretty great place to vacation. I generally got tired of the beach after three or four days and would go exploring around town. Luckily, Old Orchard had plenty of neat stuff. It had a decent and charming little library, with giant scholarly tomes on the history of Blondie and Popeye, and a pretty decent - if eclectic - comic books section. I read The Dark Knight Returns for the first time at that library, and also Chuck Colson: Born Again, the infamous Archie Comics propaganda piece about the douchebag Nixon conspirator who found Jesus right about the time he went to prison for being a douchebag. Except in the comic book, it was all a big misunderstanding!

It had a church which played movies every night for a lousy dollar admission, and not shitty old movies that no thirteen-year-old would want to see but seriously good movies, like The Princess Bride and Who Framed Roger Rabbit!? and Driving Miss Daisy and Beetlejuice. I saw Glory on the big screen for the first time in that church, and it blew me away. (Still does. If you have not seen Glory, what the hell is wrong with you?)

It had an old-timey ice-cream and penny candy emporium, much like the gay thing Taylor Doose had in Gilmore Girls, except that this one wasn’t fake and old-timey for the sake of being old-timey. It was old-timey because it was old, and care had been taken in its upkeep. The owner was a bitter old man who hated children, and it was not until our third summer there that I discovered, thanks to a local kid, that this was because he had not realized that his candy stick assortment was right underneath the always-open window that he could not see while he was serving customers. If you went in and bought a chocolate bar, with a little planning and an accomplice it was incredibly easy to swipe half again the bar’s value in grape and cherry and lemon candy sticks. To this day, I am undecided if the old guy was genuinely not aware of this and blamed all his problems on a plague of shoplifters, or if he knew about it and put his cheapest candy under the window in order to drive up sales of everything else.

It had a gigantic amusement park and fun-pier with several enormous arcades. This was, to me, well worth the trip alone; in later years and later vacations, I became a pinball fanatic and could get an hour’s worth of play out of two dollars on some of the machines. My favorite was the Bally Midway Doctor Who pinball machine, closely matched by the Data East Star Trek and the Midway Star Wars - some of the greatest pinball machines ever made. I’m not nearly as good now, when I see a pinball machine gathering dust in a bar somewhere. Nobody is as good at pinball as they are before they turn twenty.

It had a Catholic church. I know this because my mother, on any vacation we took, could unerringly find a Catholic church so that we would not miss Sunday mass. This seemed staggeringly unfair to me.

It had tons of Quebecois kids, whom one could play with quite reliably despite the obvious language barrier of them barely speaking English and me barely speaking French. Every summer I would befriend one Quebecois kid about my age, and we would hang out, intuitively building sandcastles or dams (there was always a river or creek leading to the beach that was worth trying to dam, although as one might expect, we never entirely managed it) or setting off water rockets or fireworks. When I was ten I discovered the M-80, which in my adulthood I figure were purchased and sold by the local general store illegally, as they had been illegal for over a decade before I ever saw one. It is testament to my uncanny skill with explosives that I never blew my face off with one of the damn things.¹ In any case, the Quebecois kids never stopped me from doing any of this. It’s entirely possible that they tried to but the language barrier got in the way; mostly we used our bilingual mothers to translate for us when needed, and we’d never tell our mothers we were playing with firecrackers.

It had strange brands and franchises who were of course surely mundane, but whose unfamiliarity to my Canadian upbringing made them seem exotic and special. It might seem ridiculous that a Laverdiere’s or a Waldenbooks could seem special, but they did. I always insisted that, when on vacation, we get several Stouffer’s french-bread oven pizzas. I had seen the ads for them while watching The Cosby Show. Similarly, I demanded that we try Lender’s frozen bagels, which sparked a lifelong adoration of the (non-frozen) bagel that has not ceased.² My father was more interested in the local delicacies: lobster, birch beer, lobster, crab cakes, lobster, and lobster.

It had Shaw’s, one of my favorite grocery store chains ever. Shaw’s had the most fantastic jumbo cookies, which by themselves were great, but then one summer we came back and I asked to go along on the initial grocery shopping trip (as I always did), and Shaw’s had gone to the devil well of pure inspiration: no longer were their cookies packaged in the standard twist-tie paper sacks, but instead were arrayed flat on upside-down Frisbees and Saran-wrapped in place. Thus, you bought the cookies and you got a free Frisbee! (And it was really a free Frisbee: the cookies weren’t any more expensive.) My mother was possibly more impressed than I was; my mother has always had an innate love of anything she can consider a bargain, and a free Frisbee definitely qualified. I am dead sure that if I went to my parents’ house right now and rummaged through the “outdoor sports equipment” bin, I would find three or four of those Frisbees.

But ultimately, I would get bored with everything else and go back to the beach, because when you are a kid the beach is pretty awesome. I was old enough to know not to fuck around with the riptides around the rocks that would drag you out quickly. I knew not to poke the jellyfish. I was eleven, and I knew what was what, so my parents generally let me roam while paying attention to my younger siblings. This was a mistake, for although on the surface I seemed smart, I was of course a spastic idiot.

How spastic an idiot was I? Well, let me put it to you this way: I decided to float on an air mattress in the water. Fine and good. But, I reasoned, the waves wouldn’t let me float properly, they’d keep getting seawater in my face. So I pushed the air mattress out beyond the wave breaks (I was up to my chest in water at this point), hopped on, and just lay back and relaxed for a while.

I have no idea how quickly I floated out; I lost track of time. What I do know is that at some point I decided it was time to go back to the house and get a cookie, so I flopped off the mattress

- and promptly sank down about five or six feet before I was able to start splashing my way frantically back up to the surface. I didn’t touch bottom. I don’t think I could have managed to touch bottom at that point even with sustained diving effort. It’s hard for me now, as an adult, to judge how far out I was, but I’d guess probably about three hundred feet or so. To a kid, it seemed like a couple of kilometers. (The metric system in Canada took, but only fitfully. We measure a person’s height in feet and inches; short distances in feet; the distance from home to the cottage in kilometers.) The point was - even though I wasn’t endlessly far away from land, I was a long way out. In retrospect it is actually kind of amazing that the lifeguards didn’t notice me or do anything.

Suddenly I regretted reading all those ZooBooks.³ Especially the one about sharks. Yes, I reasoned, it was unlikely that a great white shark was anywhere nearby, because great white sharks didn’t hang around the Maine coast so much. Then again, I had to admit, it was awfully unlikely that I had managed to get out here in the first place, and yet, here I was. This was not a day to mess with the odds. The odds were not my friend.

I was so worried about sharks as I began slowly paddling back to shore (fitfully, afraid of sharks hovering below the surface wanting to bite off my hands) that I didn’t realize that clouds had swept in overhead while I was relaxing. Big, dark clouds. The lifeguards on shore were waving people in now. It wasn’t raining, but you knew it was going to rain, and soon. But the rain wasn’t the issue: the problem was that the storm-swells, the giant waves, had already begun in advance of the rain, because this storm was coming in from offshore. The storm itself would last the next day and a half, absolutely drenching the whole of southern Maine in typhoon-quality downpour, and would eventually prove to be very cool to watch. But that was later.

The waves started getting bigger and bigger, and I wasn’t near the breaks yet, and I didn’t yet know that the breaks were already six feet high. All I knew is that the swells were getting bigger and I was going up and down, it seemed, more than I was going towards the beach. I started paddling harder, figuring that the sharks had probably taken off for someplace calmer at this point.

I’m not sure when I hit the breaks, but I know what happened: I was overtaken by a particularly massive wave and swept to shore. I swallowed about half a gallon of seawater and my eyes stung like motherfuckers. In later days, I would dramatize the situation to my friends by claiming that what actually happened is that the swell rocketed me up into the air, and I grabbed both ends of the air mattress and glided down, using it like a parachute. (I even drew a picture of it for art class, when we did our “what we did on our summer vacation” art projects. My self-depiction was quite magnificent.)

Of course, that was total bullshit. What happened is this: I nearly drowned, lost all sense of direction on the way, and in fact when the wave deposited me on the beach spent several seconds trying to crawl back into the surf because I thought I was headed for drier land. I am pretty sure a lifeguard saw me as he cleared people away from the disaster-level waves, but since he never tried to save me I can only assume he thought “well, at least his death will improve the gene pool.”

Eventually I managed to get enough breath to get to my knees, only to be smacked in the face by another six-foot wave. If I had been prepared for the wave, getting smacked by it would have been fun. However, I was very obviously not prepared for it and was shoved back onto my ass, choking down yet more seawater and possibly a small crab. Luckily, though, this time I was shoved backwards enough that I was now out of the breaks. My air mattress was behind me, having been blown to safety quite some time previous.

At this point, my mother came along, dragging one of my younger siblings and carrying my baby brother. “Chris, come on, what are you waiting for?”

“I nearly drowned just now, Mom.”

“That’s nice, dear. Come on, it’s raining.”

“Really, Mom. Lucky to be alive.”

“It’s raining, dear.”

Top comment: I think the time I most feared for my life was when I was on a class trip to France and me and a couple friends thought it would be a good idea to sneak up the back side of a Benedictine monastery so we wouldn’t have to pay to get in, but it was on the edge of a cliff in the mountains. So we were climbing around on the edge of the cliff trying to find a break in the fence, when suddenly I realized that I was one misstep away from a very terrifying and painful death, and was like, “I am retarded! Get me out of here!” and climbed down and paid the 5 euro or whatever. – Karen

1. If MythBusters had been around then, I probably would have used the M-80s to imitate Adam and Jamie in some manner. “Can an M-80 blow up a car? Let’s bust that myth!” [↩]
2. Unlike my love of the french-bread oven pizza, which I have since learned to be crap. [↩]
3. Aside: the modern ZooBooks lack a certain sense of dignity. My Zoobooks were old-school ZooBooks, with the big, blocky, Roman-esque font. Like this one, except not in Spanish. [↩]