1. Expecting that the follow-up to The Dark Knight is going to be a film adaptation of The Dark Knight Returns.
Michael Doran had a piece on Newsarama that started some of conversation about how the logical sequel to The Dark Knight would have to be an adaptation of Miller’s mini-series, in order to complete the three-act structure of the films. Which makes a little bit of sense, if you say it in a really authoritative voice (or, maybe, if you can mimic Bale’s bat-growl), but is actually kinda silly. One, the Nolan pictures aren’t a trilogy and don’t need to be. Two, one of the main things that made them work is the cast, which would have to be dumped entirely in order to skip ahead twenty years. And three, everything that makes The Dark Knight Returns work doesn’t exist for this version of Batman.

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)

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Calvin and Jobs.

(edit: via Alasdair.)

My weekly TV columnn is up at Torontoist.

New from me at The Court: a dramatic expansion of the CRA’s power to impound financial records.

It’s more important than it sounds!

A post at The Court from me, about ultra-liberal Justice Abella and ultra-conservative Justice Rothstein, and why no Supreme Court justice in Canada is really “ultra” anything.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

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

(found via the slog)

Shorter Climbing Out Of The Dark:

Alleging something and saying something are two very different things, and this proves that the Globe and Mail is a dirty Commie rag.

Shorter Matthew Siscoe:

Since Al-Qaeda is Sunni and Saddam Hussein was Sunni, it therefore stands to reason that a small, disorganized and mostly loathed band of religious fanatics can achieve exactly the same result as a Western-backed secular strongman starting out from a position of centralized government power.

Shorter Halls of Macadamia:

There was a violent incident in the city yesterday, so this obviously disproves any “statistical evidence” of “dropping crime rates.”

Shorter Right on Course:

An Australian computer programmer with no expertise in climatology said there’s no such thing as global warming in a newspaper devoutly supporting denial of global warming theory, and this gives us cause to re-evaluate carbon taxation.

Shorter Celestial Junk:

A progressive is anybody I don’t like.

“Shorter” concept invented by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all internet traditions.

Jesus Christ are purity balls creepy.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Things That Are Good About Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog:

– Neil Patrick Harris. The fact that Doogie has become a nerd phenomenon and a legitimate comic lead really just tickles me endless, but you can’t say it’s anything but deserved; NPH has screen presence coming out the ass, the acting chops to back it up and the willingness to look ridiculous that only the greats have. He elevates a slight storyline every time he’s on screen (which is most of it) and carries his character perfectly.

– “With My Freeze Ray.” It’s the best song in the entire thing, really the only one that’s two steps above generic-level filk. Luckily, it’s also the leadoff song so it helps snag the viewer early, which is important.

– Now we all know: you don’t need millions and millions of dollars to make a commercially viable sci-fi mini-feature! You just need to know lots of people with technical expertise willing to work very cheaply!

Things That Are So-So About Dr. Horrible And His Sing-Along Blog:

– Most of the rest of the songs. They aren’t very catchy, sometimes get musically confusing (all the crossover vocals – yes, we get it, it’s a musical, but crossover vocals are a gimmick best used sparingly) and don’t even always work for comic value. (Usually, but not always.) It doesn’t help that out of the entire cast, NPH is the only one who can really deliver a good dramatic vocal performance.

– Captain Hammer in general. I was totally stoked to see Dr. Horrible because it’s about a supervillain, and from that angle it works, because Dr. Horrible is a wonderfully mixed-up character with both admirable and deplorable qualities. The problem is that Captain Hammer is a one-note “stupid dickhead in position of authority” trope, which just gets in the way of Dr. Horrible’s complexity; surely Dr. Horrible must be in the right if he opposes Captain Hammer, and that ruins a lot of the character’s ambiguity. It doesn’t help that Nathan Fillion (an actor I normally like) hams it up like mad, mugging his way through the story (a decision, I am sure, that was directorial).

Things That Suck About Dr. Horrible And His Sing-Along Blog:

– The ending. Dear god, the ending. This is not a criticism that a silly story can’t have a serious ending, but come on – this is third-grade-level irony, the sort of thing that makes the rotting corpse of O. Henry sit up in his grave and mumble “oh, that just will not do” through disintegrating lips. It’s a shameless, unmerited plea for gravitas, and worse it’s handled in Whedon’s trademark manner for this sort of thing (I am mostly trying to avoid specific spoilers here) so not only does it come off as cheesy but also unoriginal. Prior to the last five minutes of Dr. Horrible I was thinking “well, it’s good enough for what it is.” Afterwards, that changed to “I wish that had been good enough for what it was.”

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

My other column at Thecourt.ca this week is about Keays v. Honda, a case that has redefined the employer-employee relationship in this country for the worse. Needless to say, I was less than impressed.

I frequently hear complaints from people in other countries about their mobile phone service. Well, you know what, people in other countries? You can all suck it, because Canada has the worst mobile phone service in the entire fucking world. People living in countries in equatorial Africa look at Canadian mobile phone plans and say “holy shit, are you people serious?”

Here is the latest bit of genius from the ad wizards who came up with the last one: Bell and Telus (which is owned by Bell but maintained as a separate company) want to charge users fifteen cents for every text message they receive. Seriously! Their excuse is “our network can’t handle this staggering stream of data from all these text messages!”

Now, the largest SMS text messages clock out at 1120 bits (of course most texts aren’t anywhere near that large considering how long most texts are, but hey, let’s use the maximum). Now, Canadians (all of them, including the ones signed on with services like Rogers or Fido, which Bell doesn’t own and therefore we shouldn’t count, but again, let’s play “fudge the numbers for Bell’s benefit”) sent 10.1 billion text messages last year. So if we do the math, we see that SMS messages took up a total of 11.3 trillion bits of bandwidth! THAT’S SO MANY BITS!

Or, more simply, it’s about one and a half terabytes of bandwidth over the course of a year. That’s not small, but it doesn’t sound like, you know, enough to crash the cell network or anything.

But wait, it gets even better! See, Bell and Telus plan to charge users not for the texts they send, but the texts they receive! So if you get spam texts (increasingly common even despite filtering attempts), or unwanted texts from that person you slept with and then decided WHOA BAD IDEA, you have to pay for them. Very generously, Bell and Telus representatives have said they’ll review any contested SMS bill as regards unwanted texts, with all the legendary speed and faithful service Canadians have come to expect from Bell Canada (official motto: “no, fuck you“).

Of course, thanks to this post, I know now that Apple is so pissed off at Rogers – exclusive vendor of the iPhone in Canada – over Rogers’ shitty-ass data plans (sixty bucks for four hundred megs of data? WTF) that they’re refusing to sell iPhones in Canadian Apple Stores and diverting shipments of iPhones meant for Canada to Europe instead.

I love living in a technological communications duopoly! It’s awesome!