The Snake
What It Is: A debut comedy about a serious sleaze who joins a support group for people with poor body-image because he wants to do it with one of the girls, and seduces her by enabling her bulimia.
Who’s In It: The co-directors and their girlfriends, some actors you’ve never heard of in your life, and, inexplicably, Margaret Cho for about two minutes.
Is It Good? Actually, it’s amazing. The screening on Friday night was introduced by Patton Oswalt, who hasn’t got a film in the festival, or even a gig in town – he was just taken enough by the picture to help promote it. His promotion included name-dropping the fact that other famous folks, like Joss Whedon, had seen the screener and loved it. If I were famous, he could cite me, too – The Snake is hilarious, and it manages to make a comedy about a protagonist with no redeeming qualities that neither offers him redemption nor asks you to sympathize with him in any way.
How It Will Change Film As We Know It: The thing, while it’s drop-dead hysterical, looks like it may as well have been shot on a cell phone camera. The sound in certain scenes is full of background noise that makes you strain to hear the actors. Technically, the thing is a mess. And after five minutes, there’s no reason to care. If this one catches on, it could change the rules a bit in the same way that Clerks did fifteen years ago.

Alexander the Last
What It Is: The fifth movie from some dude named Joe Swanburg about how it’s really really hard to be a white person with artistic and creative ambition in your twenties in New York, and how it’s especially hard to be that sort of person and married, because you’ll be attracted to other people sometimes and you might have to stop being 100% self-absorbed for a little while as you decide not to fuck anyone else.
Who’s In It: The girl from Teeth is the female lead, some skinny dude with a punchable face is the male lead, and the dude who played Grover in Kicking and Screaming (the 90’s one, not the Will Ferrell one) has a small part.
Is It Good? It is most decidedly not good, no. The film expects you to be concerned enough with the plight of these attractive people who do nothing but make art and googly-eyes at each other all day that it doesn’t give them any sort of personality at all. And I’m not being mean and saying, oh, their personalities are bland, therefore they don’t have them – seriously, there’s nothing to them, like, as a stylistic choice. It tries to be a character-based picture, but it tells us nothing about the characters. Big-time flop.
How It Will Change Film As We Know It: It had its world premiere last night at SXSW, and it was simultaneously shown on IFC, which could potentially be a new business model, I guess. It could also inspire a bunch of similar navel-gazing, if it somehow becomes a hit.

Pontypool
What It Is: Holy cow, pretty much the coolest, scariest horror movie since, I dunno, the last cool, scary horror movie.
Who’s In It: Stephen McHattie, who played Hollis Mason in Watchmen, is the lead here as the Kinky Friedman-esque iconoclastic host of a small Ontario town’s radio morning show.
Is It Good? The first 2/3 of the movie are fucking incredible. I don’t want to go into too much detail, but it’s a rare horror movie that’s able to be as tense and that terrifying as Pontypool without showing you much of anything in the way of scary images. The thing falls apart a little bit toward the end, when it tries (with a plot point cribbed from Snow Crash) to explain what’s behind the “horror” incident.
How It Will Change Film As We Know It: Giving Stephen McHattie some more work would be a significant enough achievement, but I suspect Pontypool is successful enough at finding a genuinely original way to scare audiences and defy convention that it will be ripped off for years to come.

Snowblind
What It Is: A documentary about Rachel Scdoris, the first legally blind athlete to race in the Iditarod.
Who’s In It: Rachel Scdoris, duh. Also her dad, whom the director seemed to try turn into a bad guy even though he didn’t deserve it, as well as Joe Runyan, a former Iditarod champion.
Is It Good? Kinda? Not particularly compelling, which is mind-blowing, considering the source material. You can tell that the director didn’t have much rapport with Scdoris, as she’s pretty guarded through the whole thing, and there’s not really an actual narrative or viewpoint – we just follow her around as she races, and occasionally her dad is played as a jerk living vicariously through her. Some of the photography is amazing, though.
How It Will Change Film As We Know It: I can’t imagine it will, really. Maybe they’ll do it as a narrative film, a la Snow Buddies? That’d be cool.

Anvil!: The Story of Anvil
What It Is: Anvil were a powerhouse of Canadian heavy metal that inspired Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth, and more. They toured Japan and were cited as monsters of rock and roll, back in 1982. A few years later, they were working crappy day-jobs and forgotten, while their peers were busy getting famous. This is the story of what went wrong.
Who’s In It: The dudes from Anvil, of course, as well as metal luminaries like Lars Ulrich, Lemmy, Slash, and more, most of whom spend their screen time gushing over how good Anvil were.
Is It Good? Absolutely. This is one of those documentaries like Murderball or Spellbound that sells its story better than fiction ever could. Mostly it’s due to subjects who are endlessly fascinating, a couple lucky breaks in the events that heighten the drama, and a lot of compassion for the people on screen.
How It Will Change Film As We Know It: Film? Who knows. Rock and roll? Well, Anvil are playing a showcase during SXSW Music now, thanks to the newfound attention they’re receiving in response to the documentary. If it’s not too late for some dudes in their 50’s to become rock stars after all, then everything you thought you knew about when to give up your dreams is wrong.

The festival’s only a few days old, so that’s all I’ve got. If there’s anything else amazing going on, I may sneak in another post.

Yesterday in Seattle, a man drove his pickup truck onto his friend’s roof because "he got a wild hair".

I know some of y’all might be quick to judge the man in question because, okay, that’s really stupid, but I want to hang out with him, like, twice a month. I want to go watch cover bands with him and drive thru Taco Cabana at 3am. He’s like a real-life Jim Anchower, and America needs more like him. I bet he’s the most fun uncle ever.

Also, it’s often said that the key to good journalism is detail. The fact that this guy was listening to the Spin Doctors as he drove onto the roof makes me love him entirely. Do you think he was air guitar-ing or playing the drums on the steering wheel as he went? Was it Pocketful of Kryptonite or is he the sort of fan who keeps a copy of 2005′s comeback album, Nice Talking To Me, in the cab at all times?

Also, how is none of this on YouTube? If he’s half as good on camera as he sounds on paper, we need to give him his own reality show.

(post by not-MGK author Dan Solomon)

Because we all love Lost, but can struggle to find the 22 hours required to re-watch an entire season after we know where all of the plot twists are going to come in, it’s clear we’ve all been seeking the ideal medium for enjoying an entire season’s events in roughly an hour. But which medium is appropriate? Which medium?

Well, obviously, it’s indie rock. Because the Flaming Lips may sing about robots and wizards and Superman, but even they aren’t quite nerdy enough to pen songs with titles like "Be My Constant" or "The Ballad of Sayid Jarrah". Brooklyn’s Previously On Lost has taken up the slack, complete with nasally vocals and a coke-fueled rhythm track. If you’re a Lost fan who’s secretly lamented the fact that you couldn’t dance to "There’s No Place Like Home, Part I", I hope that this provides you with what you never even knew you were missing.

Also, maybe y’all have seen it before, but the (severely missed) Mike Wieringo posted a series of Lost-themed sketches on his DeviantArt page in 2006 that I just found. They’re great, and now this post’s a two-fer.

Hey, you know who’s still a douchebag? That James Frey asshole who wrote A Milion Little Pieces.

I read a Vanity Fair article about the guy a month or two ago and thought, you know, maybe he’s not so bad, he probably deserves a second chance. And then I opened this week’s issue of TimeOut London and saw that there was an interview with him in the books section, read it, and had confirmed for me- yup, still a douchebag. But don’t take my word for it- take it away, Frey-guy:

"no book has ever been investigated or picked apart the way mine has, before or since."

No book? Ever? People investigated your book more than they did The Bell Curve, or The Population Bomb, or Holy Blood, Holy Grail? Or, I dunno, fucking Mein Kampf? I know that his point is that most memoirs don’t get the same sort of scrutiny that his did, but the way he talks about it makes it look like he thinks he’s the most specialist writer in the whole world who just got picked on so unfairly.

"if you look at memoirs in general, any one of them that’s readable is going to have the same issues that mine had."

Well, not exactly. When Frey started publishing, he tried to pick a literary fight with Dave Eggers, so let’s compare A Million Little Pieces and A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius. Okay, A-1, Eggers’ book’s central concept, that a twenty-something kid had to suddenly raise his little brother after the deaths of both of his parents, is true. Frey’s book’s concept, that he got so fucked up on drugs that he ended up in jail and then met a bunch of strange characters in rehab, including a girlfriend who killed herself, is untrue. So no, any readable memoir can exist without wholesale fabrication of the events of the author’s life. Furthermore, Eggers (who isn’t the first author to do this) included in the paperback edition of the book a full appendix of errata, explaining where the facts of reality differ from those of the book. Voila, even Frey’s literary nemesis was able to write a memoir without those "issues".

"A Million Little Pieces was written as a novel, and its intentions were all literary, all artistic. It was meant to be an insult to self-help books, and somewhere along the line it became one, and I was really uncomfortable with that. I was like, this is me spitting on self-help books… I got put on this pedestal as a recover and addiction superhero, and that was not at all what I wanted… I don’t want to be a guy on TV talking about addiction. Fuck that."

The incredibly douchey thing about this statement is that it makes it seem like all of that shit was just stuff that happened to him, rather than things he actively sought to do. He didn’t get ambushed by Oprah in the middle of the night and forced to appear on the show to talk about addiction and recovery; he didn’t have to turn his book into a brand for a certain school of self-help; he jumped on that pedestal the second it was offered to him. Which is telling, because addicts who haven’t taken any responsibility for their addiction do the exact same thing. Claiming that all of the things that happened to you just happened, as opposed to being stuff you did, is a telltale sign of an unrecovered addict. Which is pretty funny, considering who it’s coming from.

"most of the writers I love were notorious writers: Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Hemingway, Celine, Bret Easton Ellis, Mailer…"

Yeah, but guess what those guys are notorious for? Hint: it’s not lying to Oprah. I get that the guy needs to tell himself that he’s some rebel outlaw, but be real- do you think Celine would have ever taken the Oprah’s Book Club stamp on the cover of Death On The Installment Plan? Mailer wasn’t "notorious" because he fabricated events and got caught- shit, Mailer was steadfast in his dedication to keeping fact and fiction distinct. He didn’t try to pass off The Armies of the Night as straight non-fiction, and he was happy to call The Executioner’s Song and Harlot’s Ghost and Marilyn novels. Trying to pass yourself off as an heir to that when the very thing you’re notorious for flies in the face of what he was all about? Douchey, douchey, douchey.

"one of the joys of this being classified as a novel is that none of it has to be accurate or real, and if people want it to be, they can fuck off… I saw the book being discussed on ‘Newsnight Review’ and one of the guys was like ‘well, this information better be real, I feel like he’s conning us again,’ and I’m like, ‘you fucking dumbass. It’s a fucking novel. None of it has to be real.’ Frankly, he reacted just the way I hoped."

This is in response to a question about his new book being full of facts and history that are totally made-up. And yes, he’s technically correct, a novel does not have to have any true things in it if the author doesn’t want it to. But check it out- if you’re making up the history of Los Angeles  and the facts about the city, then you’re not writing about Los Angeles. You’re writing about a made-up place that exists in your imagination. You might as well be writing about Metropolis. If you have to reimagine the place in order for it to fit into your novel,  then your novel is not actually about LA.

And the douchiest thing in the interview? It comes as a response to a question about whether he wished he’d been more emphatic about how A Million Little Pieces and My Friend Leonard were meant to be classified.

"there were mistakes made, sure."

For a writer who’s not really known for using the passive voice, this is a pretty unique statement. Mistakes were made? Who made them, James? You know, what’s funny about this is the whole construction of the sentence is pretty familiar. Pretty much any time someone fucks up and doesn’t want to admit that it was their fuck-up, they’ll dip into the passive voice for a response like that. Check out the number of Bush administration dickheads who used it to explain the Iraq War, the attorney firing scandal, civilian bombings in Afghanistan, etc- General Richards, Richard Perle, Alberto Gonzales, George W Bush himself, and even John McCain- and you’ll see how powerful a linguistic device it is for people who want to avoid admitting that they fucked up.

So in a single-page interview, Frey manages to avoid admitting responsibility for the lies in his books, treat himself as a victim for having appeared on Oprah, complain about all the unfair scrutiny his made-up memoir received, argue that everybody else does it, so who cares, equate himself with Norman Mailer because he got famous for something that violated one of the main principles of Mailer’s writing, and giggle about the dumbasses who expect that a novel that’s set in Los Angeles be about the real LA and not the Narnia-LA that the author needed to create for the narrative to work. So, yeah- in case you were wondering, James Frey is still a douchebag.

See, the thing that makes The Dark Knight Returns effective is the idea that, after a spectacular crime-fighting career, explored over decades of stories in the various Batman titles, he left an indelible mark on Gotham City and cast a huge shadow that’s still felt decades after his retirement. His return is a huge deal, something that rattles Gotham to its core.

But the Batman hasn’t had that kind of career in the Nolan pictures. He’s been at it for maybe a year, if you figure that he hadn’t caught the Scarecrow yet and Wayne Manor hasn’t been rebuilt after the first movie (just enough time for Rachel Dawes to change the way she looks entirely), and if he were to suddenly vanish, twenty years later it’d be, "oh, remember when there was a guy who dressed like a bat and fought crime for a couple months a really long time ago? That was fucked up." You have to have the context of Batman as a legendary figure who changed the city forever for his return to be a big deal. Otherwise, he’d be running around opening shopping malls and struggling to get press. Twenty years is a long time.

And you can’t just set it earlier, maybe five years down the line, when his name’s still familiar and you can keep the cast, because it wouldn’t have any real impact. It’d be like Jay-Z coming out of retirement a couple years after The Black Album and underwhelming everybody. People would think he just, like, got busy and forgot to fight crime for a while.

And all of this leaves aside the fact that most of the major characters in The Dark Knight Returns don’t even exist in Nolan’s films. There’s no Robin, no Catwoman, no Superman, no Ronald Reagan… You’re left with old-guy Batman beating up old-guy Joker. There’s no point. The Dark Knight is hurtling toward half a billion dollars at the box office- there’s going to be a sequel, and it’s going to be pretty conventional. It’ll star Christian Bale as Batman in that nebulous late-20′s/early-30′s stage, he’ll fight a villain who hasn’t been in the series yet, and it’ll make another gazillion dollars.

2. Spamming LiveJournal political discussion groups with vaguely-coherent rants intended to convince people that their stereotypes of Russia are wrong.
So, like, Russia fought a war this weekend, and it was backed up by a dedicated set of blogging troops, out to win the war over the hearts and minds of the people of the world. Mostly on LiveJournal, because LiveJournal is owned by a Russian company and is the number one blogging service in the country. And those bloggers wanted the rest of the world to know that their troops were peacekeeping forces out to stop the genocidal Georgians from slaughtering the South Ossetians at George Bush’s command. But if you’re trying to convince the world that Russians are not the propaganda-spouting antagonists that much of the Western world has seen them as, spouting propaganda about the "peacemakers" actually serves to work contrary to your point.

And while it’s frankly delightful to see the nuttier online conservatives get a chance to kick it like it’s the 80′s again with big bad Russia as the enemy- seriously, it’s like the online political ranting equivalent of the Police’s reunion tour, playing venues that didn’t even exist when they were on the charts- I do feel it’s probably necessary to remind right-wing bloggers who are unable to see any amount of nuance in a situation like the one between Russia and Georgia that neither side is the hero or the villain, because it’s the real world and that shit is complex. So while I hesitate to interfere at all with their Red Dawn fantasies ("Wolveriiiiiiiiiiines!"), it’s probably for the best that this whole thing seems to have come to a relatively stable conclusion, at least until the next one.

3. Releasing an iPhone app for $1,000 called I Am Rich.
Well, mostly it’s just in bad taste, but boy, is it in bad taste. Like you’re not conspicuously consuming enough just by waving your iPhone around, you need to have a useless application to prove how little you value money? That dude should have created one called I Am Feeding Starving Children and donated the money to charity if he wanted to get his name in the news. At least then it might have been good press. 

(cross-posted to dansolomon.com)

An American Carol is basically a Scary Movie-style spoof of American liberal politics, starring every famous conservative entertainer. Which is pretty much just, um, Kelsey Grammar, Jon Voight, James Woods, and Dennis Hopper. Oh, and Kevin Sorbo. Clint Eastwood, apparently, still wanted to be able to look himself in the mirror afterwards. The cast is rounded out with conservative commentators and country music stars like Bill O’Reilly and Trace Adkins. And basically they seem to have just made a movie where they all run around saying liberals are stupid! for an hour and a half. We’ll see how that turns out for them.

The movie stars Chris Farley’s little brother (Larry the Cable Guy was busy, seriously, not a joke) as "Michael Malone", a hefty anti-American documentary filmmaker out to ban the pledge of allegiance, with the help of the dastardly movealong.org. He gets visited by the ghosts of George Washington (Jon Voight), John F Kennedy (some soap star named Chriss Anglin), and General Patton (totally Kelsey Grammar, I’m not even kidding), and they show him the error of his ways. Hence the "Carol" part of the title, I guess. Michael Moore is Scrooge.

See, it’s clever because the names are almost the same as the people they’re parodying, so you don’t have to waste time that could otherwise be spent rollicking in the funny trying to figure out exactly who each of their targets is supposed to be. They’re doing the work for you! Also, Michael Malone lets out a roaring fart within ten minutes of the film opening or I will paypal you £100.

Apparently a writer for The Weekly Standard went out to the set to rally the troops for their Hollywood Takes On The Left cover story. I will no ruin some of the film’s jokes, because it’s surely going to be funnier to read about them than to actually watch. Um, spoilers, I guess.

Dennis Hopper makes an appearance as a judge who defends his courthouse by gunning down ACLU lawyers trying to take down the Ten Commandments.
Because apparently his copy of the Ten Commandments was missing thou shall not kill, or something. See, it’s funny because it’s stupid to have to win arguments when you have guns!

David Alan Grier plays a slave in a scene designed to show Malone what might have happened if the United States had not fought the Civil War. As Patton explains to a dumbfounded Malone that the plantation they are visiting is his own, Grier thanks the documentarian for being such a humane owner. As they leave, another slave, played by Gary Coleman, finishes polishing a car and yells "Hey, Barack!" before tossing the sponge to someone off-camera.
Wait, this movie has Gary Coleman in it? Playing a slave? And Obama jokes? I take it back, this does sound edgy and hilarious. I like to hope that the scene ends with Chuck Norris kicking Barack’s head off.

In the film, a rotund comedian named Rosie O’Connell makes an appearance on The O’Reilly Factor to promote her documentary, The Truth About Radical Christians. O’Reilly shows a clip, which opens with a pair of priests walking through an airport–as seen from pre-hijacking surveillance video–before boarding the airplane. Once onboard, they storm the cockpit using crucifixes as their weapon of choice. Get it, because Christians would never do anything violent. All those abortion doctors just blew up spontaneously.

And finally, if you were wondering the philosophy governing Zucker’s entire career, it’s summed up succinctly in the article:

"Why be original?" Zucker asks. "I’ve done that. It doesn’t work, like BASEketball."

I’m sure this’ll be a gem. Watch for a huge push from nuttier conservative groups to drive it to the top of the weekend box office, so they can prove that America really loves this stuff, and then for it to flop harder than Battlefield: Earth. At which point they’ll blame the puny man-animal liberals for stifling their expression.

(cross-posted to dansolomon.com)

Why is it then that left-wingers feel free to make their films direct and realistic, whereas Hollywood conservatives have to put on a mask in order to speak what they know to be the truth?

There’s no need to "put on a mask" if your point is to explore the complexities of a situation. If you want to examine the military policy in the Iraq war, you don’t need to re-shoot Star Wars from a viewpoint that’s critical of the Jedi council’s tactics against the Sith. You can just set the damn thing in Baghdad. But if you want to claim that Lyndie England was a hero and George W Bush is the bravest man to ever walk the face of the planet Earth, you need a lot of layers of allegory for people to not laugh (or spit) in your face.

Why is it, indeed, that the conservative values that power our defense — values like morality, faith, self-sacrifice and the nobility of fighting for the right — only appear in fantasy or comic-inspired films like "300," "Lord of the Rings," "Narnia," "Spiderman 3" and now "The Dark Knight"?

Because the idea that those values can be determined without any messy moral ambiguities only exist in worlds created by people who are specifically trying to have easily identifiable good guys and bad guys. You have to create a world in which the right-wing "reality" applies. It’s easy to know who the bad guys are in Lord of the Rings because they’re orcs led by a giant evil eye. It’s easy to know who the villain is in Spider-Man 3 because he’s named Venom and wears an evil black costume. If the world actually worked that way, then right-wingers would be welcome to make their films as direct and realistic as they liked.

The answers to these questions seem to me to be embedded in the story of "The Dark Knight" itself: Doing what’s right is hard, and speaking the truth is dangerous. Many have been abhorred for it, some killed, one crucified.

Don’t look now, but I think that this guy just made the claim that the first person to make a film in which George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld personally beat up Saddam Hussein will be the next Jesus.

Leftists frequently complain that right-wing morality is simplistic. Morality is relative, they say; nuanced, complex. They’re wrong, of course, even on their own terms.

And for evidence, witness how successful caped vigilantes have been at protecting major world cities from supervillains.

The true complexity arises when we must defend these values in a world that does not universally embrace them — when we reach the place where we must be intolerant in order to defend tolerance, or unkind in order to defend kindness, or hateful in order to defend what we love.

What’s awesome about statements like this is that, when you decide that intolerance, unkindness, and hate are useful tools for a better world, you become indistinguishable from those who use them for purposes you don’t find quite so noble.

It’s almost like you become two-faced, using your unambiguous moral certainty that you’re doing the right thing to commit unspeakable acts. I don’t know if this guy actually watched the whole thing, but the self-righteous, unquestioning character convinced of his own goodness is Harvey Dent, not Bruce Wayne. And dude, I’m pretty sure he was a bad guy.

(cross-posted to www.dansolomon.com)

Because there aren’t enough webcomics capable of totally breaking your heart in twelve pages.

(found via the slog)

Finally, there’s enough information available to make an informed decision on the US Presidential election! Or, at least, there will be soon. IDW is publishing Presidential Comics, a flip-book biography of Barack Obama and John McCain, in October. The Obama side is written by Jeff Mariotte, who will presumably not indulge his tendency to have his protagonist fight vampires, and drawn by Tom Morgan. John McCain’s bio, meanwhile, features Stephen Thompson on pencils and Andy Helfer on the script. J Scott Campbell is responsible for both covers.

A few thoughts:

I’m going to go ahead and guess, based on the fact that he drew John McCain as the chubby Joker, while Barack Obama looks like he could have been an IO Agent with a heart of gold in a mid-90′s issue of Gen 13, that J Scott Campbell prefers the Democratic nominee. If Campbell’s McCain popped up in the pages of Danger Girl, you can be pretty sure that he’d be leering over Silicon Valerie’s tank top and secretly trying to have the girls all killed.

If they weren’t being published as a two-fer, by what margin do you think the Obama issue would outsell the John McCain book? I’m guessing it’d be at least 3-1 from Diamond, which means Obama can probably rest easy among the crucial people who do the orders for comic book stores demographic. This is kinda funny, too, because McCain’s is the one which’ll have all the action and airplanes and stuff.

Will it be a single conservative blogger looking for a fresh angle, or a big-name Michelle Malkin-type who cries foul at the fact that McCain looks like Mister Rictus from Wanted while the interior art for the Obama book is from an ex-Captain America artist? The answer to this depends on how very slow the news day is when someone visits the IDW site.

How awesome would it be if this is a big hit and IDW starts putting out books like this for minor-party candidates? Who would you want to draw the cover for the Ralph Nader and Bob Barr biographies? Also, if they did one about Ron Paul, would his fans buy multiple copies each in an attempt to prove that he’s more popular than either Obama or McCain based on his Diamond sales figures?

(cross-posted to dansolomon.com)

You could start with pretty much every major political figure who endorsed Nicolas Sarkozy over Segolene Royal in 2007 because she was too inexperienced, despite having almost the exact same resume- three ministerial posts, having served as a deputy to the National Assembly, and a former head of a regional government. That includes members of her own party who endorsed the male candidate over her. It’d definitely include the fellow Socialist senator who chose to endorse a right-wing dude because, while Royale may be pretty, the presidential election is not a beauty contest. And there’s no question that you’d have to deport the UMP minister who explained that her best chance of winning would come if her looks could help hide the fact that she’s a bitch.

You might have to start plucking random French citizens and inquiring why only 18% of the parliament is made up of women- behind such noted stalwarts of the principle of equality of the sexes as the United Arab Emirates and Afghanistan. You could inquire as to why 60% of the unemployed in France are women, and 75% of part-time workers. Why, there are all sorts of things that might need to be cleared up if upholding the principle of equality of the sexes is now one of the major determinants in defining Frenchness.

Over and over again, people assert that they haven’t got a problem with Muslims at all, no, that’s not it- it’s just that they’re so unenlightened toward women! It’s a classic attempt to do some rhetorical judo- instead of saying we just don’t want those people here and looking like bigots, instead they get to play the grand feminists. And if they’re so concerned about women’s rights that they’ll, you know, deny them citizenship for wearing a burqa, then surely we can forgive them if they haven’t quite overcome the whole problem with equal pay, dismissing female politicians as unserious, keeping them at under 20% of business executives (or should it be "exec-cute-ives"?), dropping those power words like bitch whenever threatened, and so on… At least they’re paying lip service to invented obstacles toward an equal society, after all.

And I don’t mean to pick on the French. I like them! But you’ll see this attitude throughout the Western world. You’ll see it in new London mayor Boris Johnson, decrying the way women are treated in Afghanistan on one hand, while his chief of staff defends the fact that he fired the five top-ranked women in city hall on the grounds that women just aren’t as qualified. You’ll see it in every American preacher who weeps for women’s rights in the Muslim world but thinks that their American counterparts are baby factories. And if it bums you out and you’re hoping to find a place to get away from it, don’t count on the pony rides and free health care of France as a safe haven.

(cross-posted to dansolomon.com)

I loathe air travel (it’s hard to enjoy it when you’re busy gripping the armrest in white-knuckle terror while the crash sequence from the first season of lost plays an endless loop in your head), but I understand its necessity. I don’t wish to see the airlines fail, and I thought I might offer a few modest suggestions to help them raise a little bit of extra dough and try to drag that bottom line into the black for the first time in many a moon.

Allow customers to pay a surcharge that would prevent the person in front of them from reclining his or her seat. It just seems like common sense, really. Especially on those tiny planes the budget lines throw up into the sky, there are few things that make a flight more aggravating than some selfish jerk in front of you going back as far as they can and claiming the four inches of legroom that you had so your knees now rest firmly on your tray-table, even in its locked and upright position. Even if they weren’t struggling for cash, they should offer this. But since money is tight, why not turn it into a bidding war? You and the guy in front of you can each try to top one another, in five dollar increments, for the right to recline or not to recline. On long-haul flights especially, they could make a fortune.

Remove the seats in the back and add a "standing room" class. You can fit a hell of a lot more people in a space if they’re standing up than if they’re sitting, you know. And those seats have to weigh something- if they spin this right, it becomes a way for them to get greener. Getting rid of unnecessary weight reduces the amount of fuel consumed, like the excuses they offered when they started charging for luggage, and it’s hard to argue with the math behind the fuller flights you’d get if you increased the capacity of each plane. The relative carbon footprint of each passenger goes down the more people who are aboard the flight, assuming fuel consumption and emissions remain a constant. This is a solid PR move, and an extra dozen tickets for sale per flight, especially if those people are paying to check bags, would add up quickly. Fast-track this one, airlines, you won’t regret it.

Call the part where they instruct passengers on what to do in the event of an emergency landing a "flight safety class", and ask a $25 tuition fee. I know this would be unpopular at first, but they always insist that the information has changed, so clearly it must be vital. These are dangerous times, and preparedness is everyone’s responsibility.

Coin-operated oxygen masks. You know what else causes emissions? CO2. You know what puts CO2 into the atmosphere? People exhaling. At the altitude at which planes fly, any extra carbon is especially dangerous. Yet in the event of an emergency, what do the airlines do? They allow customers to pump as much CO2 into the atmosphere as they want, without requiring them to take any responsibility, fiscal or otherwise, for the repercussions of their actions. But at twenty-five cents for every fifteen seconds of air you breathe, you’d really consider just how much carbon dioxide you wanted to let flow from your lungs into the atmosphere. Again, it’s money and the environment. Who can argue with that?

Hire a precocious twelve year old named Kevin to walk up and down the aisles and hit passengers in the back of the head. Many economists* agree that one of the best ways to keep a looming recession at bay is to put more money in the hands of young people. Part of the reason that the US "stimulus package" was panned by critics was that the people who got their checks were likely to save it or use it to pay down their debt, rather than pump it right back into the economy. Kids, who hate saving and have no debt, blow their cash on video games and cigarettes that they get their cool older siblings to purchase for them. It only makes sense to employ more of them. This is another win-win. The airlines have been steadily working to get their passengers to accept all manner of indignities as par for the course, so why not hire Kevin? He’ll go up and down the aisles and slap passengers in the back of the head- unless they pay a surcharge. For just ten bucks in fees, you can enjoy a flight free of head-slaps and as peaceful as you’re used to, with only the constant interruptions of the pilot and flight attendants, crying babies, aisle-mate with the bladder of a five year old who keeps getting up to use the bathroom, and low, guttural whimpering from me to disturb you. What’s more, you can safely feel superior to those passengers who failed to pony up the surcharge to keep Kevin at bay, which has been part of the point of the airlines’ price plans for decades. 

In just a few simple steps, I’ve saved an entire industry from bankruptcy. Someone hire me to be a CEO of something.

*who I just made up

(cross-posted to dansolomon.com)

Like, check this out! Toddlers Who Dislike Spicy Food Racist, Says Report… A government-sponsored body puts out a report that says that kids who don’t like food from other cultures must not like it because they’re racist. That’s so fucked up! Let’s check in with some bloggers and pundits and make sure that they’re aware of how crazy the “PC Police” have gotten.

The USA Today ridicules the fact British authorities are on the lookout for racist attitudes among the nation’s toddlers.

James Taranto, in the Wall Street Journal, agrees that the notion that one’s taste in food has anything to do with one’s attitude toward groups of people is far-fetched to begin with.

Instapundit thinks tar and feathers are too good for these people who claim that if your kid doesn’t like foreign food, it’s because you’re racist.

Even the BBC seems to think that telling nursery staff must be alert for racist remarks among toddlers, a government-sponsored agency report is fairly absurd.

And boy, who can argue with that? It’s really just common sense, when you think about it. Surely a government-sponsored agency has better things to do than demand that day-care and nursery workers tell toddlers that they’re racist because they think curry is yucky! We can all agree just how absurd this is.

Except take a step back. The “government-sponsored agency” in question is the National Children’s Bureau (whose name is decried as “Orwellian” and “Kafka-esque”, variously, by outraged bloggers). The “report” that they put out is 366 pages, and the bit about food appears in two sentences near the end. The NCB is indeed funded in part by government grants, but the Telegraph story that started this sweeping outrage throughout the Internet wrongly claims that its £12million annual budget comes “mainly from Government funded organizations”. The “report” is actually a book that was written by a woman who is not employed by the NCB, and it was printed on a variation of print-on-demand, where the profits from book sales fund the publication.

You can find the operating budget of any UK charity here. If you do that, you’ll learn that less than half of the budget from the NCB comes from government sources. If you go to the organization’s website, you’ll learn that, rather than being a product of big government, they’re actually a mid-sized charity that employs a staff of 20 (plus some full- and part-time fundraisers, who are paid a commission). They had an operating budget of £12million, which sounds like a lot, except that even the Donkey Sanctuary has a budget of almost twice that. The UK government awards grants to a very wide array of charities (what would be called non-profit groups in the US) and it doesn’t make the NCB a government body any more than it makes the Unicorn Theatre or the Oxfam one.

And the context of the quote that’s sent everyone’s blood pressure through the roof?

a child may react negatively to a culinary tradition other than their own by saying, ‘yuck!’. that may indicate a lack of familiarity with that particular food, or ‘more seriously a reaction to a food associated with people from a particular ethnic or cultural community’.

Why, it states outright that maybe the kid just hasn’t had it and doesn’t like it. It turns out you can actually not like foreign food because you don’t like it, so everyone can sleep easy.

The point of this section of the book is to examine the attitudes kids may be getting from their parents, and to be on the lookout for certain clues. It may be that a kid just doesn’t like curry, or it’s possible that the kid’s parents told him that Indians are dirty and he shouldn’t eat their food. This is listed as one of very many possible warning signs, and is meant to be examined in context- if a kid refuses to sit near or play with kids of another race, learned from his dad that it’s okay to call them “pakis”, and refuses to eat food from other cultures, then maybe it’s something to consider. Now who’s got common sense on their side?

And all of this is based on the notion that nursery care workers shouldn’t be bothering with stuff like this, that it’s somehow Big Brother stepping in and telling kids not to speak their minds. And you know what? That’s a fine opinion, and if it’s yours, you’re welcome to it. In that case, I strongly recommend not putting your kids into a nursery. Adults have every right to correct the behavior of children, and when they’re entrusted with the care of those kids, they’ve actually got a responsibility to do it.

So, just to summarize-

The book isn’t a “report” by a “government agency”. The woman who wrote it is an independent author who doesn’t even work for the charity that published it, and she wasn’t funded by any government money. The book never claims that kids are racist if they don’t like certain foods. Can all these people be outraged by something real next time?