Your guest judges tonight are Blake and Melissa Williams, who is dubbed “the queen of new disco.” (As opposed to “the queen of taking themed jazz choreography and coming up with a new name for it,” I guess.)

Amanda and Denys: “the dreaded quickstep.” Because apparently nobody is allowed to just call it “quickstep” any longer. Now and forever, it is dreaded, despite the fact that there have easily been far more bad krumps and foxtrots in SYTYCD history then there have been bad quicksteps. All of that having been said, this was a perfectly entertaining quickstep by TonyNMelanie, although I thought the bit where they tried to mix in a bit of twist-and-shake while still in closed hold looked clumsy. Very well executed other than that bit, though; Denys nailed it as predictably as one would expect, and Amanda pairs with him very well.

Janick and Shavar: hip-hop. Janick got insane props for her performance in this bit of Luther choreo which I felt weren’t entirely deserved; she was good but not great, especially considering how average her first half was. But she finished strong. Shavar was ridiculously good at this the entire way through, which was both to be expected and still a pleasant surprise given how people can underperform in their genres all too frequently. This is basically a lot of words to say that although not all of the judges’ hyperbole was warranted, quite a bit of it was.

Julia and Jesse: contemporary. Hey, did anybody read that thing in the New York Times this weekend which totally dissed “SYTYCD contemporary” for being shallow and predictable? Anyway, Stacey Tookey or no, I would like to request a one-year moratorium on SYTYCD routines themed after Romeo and Juliet, because enough already with that stuff. Anyway, bluntly: Jesse just doesn’t have stage presence yet. Julia has heaps of it, but you can’t dance a duet by yourself. And that is what mattered here. When judges on this show are all “Jesse, we hoped for better” – even Jean-Marc – you know you’ve missed the mark.

Charlene and Jeff: hustle. This was really entertaining and a surprise for that reason, since I wasn’t expecting it after their bad jive from week one. I think I actually would have preferred that it be set to music that was a bit more uptempo, just because the relaxed, groovy song actually made the movements feel a bit slower than they were. But: very good partnering, excellent work on difficult lifts, and they mastered the spins and groundwork which were arguably more difficult (and less showy) quite nicely. This was very good.

Natalie and Mackenzie: cha cha. Oddly enough, Jean-Marc remembered that he was a ballroom expert and thus actually managed to point out what none of the other judges did: namely, that Mackenzie danced this for crap. No form, no Latin bounce, no nothing. Having seen what Gustavo MOTHERFUCKING Vargas does with a cha-cha previously over two seasons, this was easily the most basic thing he’s ever choreo’d (one big lift, no terribly difficult floorwork) and Mackenzie still danced it badly. Natalie was okay, but given the simplicity of the routine I’m not impressed. Weak sauce.

Danielle and Sebastian: contemporary. Wait, Danielle not only has scar tissue on her lungs but also she’s dyslexic too? Damn, sometimes the universe just does not like you. Anyway. Judges fall all over themselves to praise a routine ostensibly about anorexia which, had we not been told beforehand it was about anorexia, could have been about anything. That Times article I mentioned which condemned “SYTYCD contemporary” for being formulaic? This. Nothing wrong with it, other than it was boring and pointless. (Blake refers to anorexia as “controversial” which – what?)

Kirsten and Jera: hip-hop. “90s-style” is apparently an official subgenre on this show now. I am fine with this. I am not so fine with the dancing here. Kirsten’s dancing was… often not good. Jera’s dancing was better, but he had this horrific Howdy Doody grin plastered on his face the whole way through which didn’t seem cheerful and upbeat so much as it screamed “serial killer trying to play it cool.” Also, Leah Miller has stop doing every intro explaining how the dancers are out of genre because ninety percent of them are contemporary dancers so they’ll almost always be out of genre period.

Claudia and Edgar: jazz. Clunky, mostly because of Claudia – although I think Edgar escaped a small bit of blame that he might otherwise have deserved, because the reason it was so clunky were the transitions from move to move being so obvious and jarring, and that can’t be put entirely on Claudia. Not the worst of the night, but I think they’re bottom three.

Orangina and Jonathan: West Coast swing. I actually really liked Benji’s choreo (the first third of it was really very traditional WCS, except for the music, and the first lift sequence was absolutely brilliant), but it mostly confirmed what I’ve suspected for the past couple of weeks: Jonathan is the real strength in this pairing and Kloe is, well, not. He handled his half, she didn’t. Just that simple.

Probable bottom three: Claudia and Edgar, Julia and Jesse, Natalie and Mackenzie.
Should go home: Claudia and Jesse.
Will go home: Claudia and Jesse.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Of IDW’s recent Archie comics collections, Archie: The Daily Newspaper Comics 1946-1948 is by some distance the best. First, it’s a real collection; it has all the daily strips written and drawn by Archie creator Bob Montana (who mostly concentrated on the strip, rather than the comic books, until his death in 1975) from the beginning in 1946 until October 1948, and nearly all of them have never appeared in book form — in fact, the originals are gone, and IDW had to find a fan who’d cut all these strips out of the original newspapers. Second, it’s got actual information to go with the comics: biographical stuff about Montana and MLJ Comics.

And third, the strip is good. It later became a funny but standard gag-a-day strip, but in the early years Montana did story arcs, some of them lasting for weeks, along with the individual gags. The energy of his drawing and writing is hard to resist; as the foreword points out, he liked to throw in jokes throughout the strip rather than just using the first three panels as buildup to a punchline. And because the series creator was doing the newspaper comics — which were more prestigious than the books — it was there that the characters really developed both in characterization and look; you can watch as he starts out with the more realistic early versions of the girls in 1946, and has the cartoony “modern” versions more or less down by the end of the book. (It’s something of a myth that Dan DeCarlo modernized the looks of the characters, though he certainly brought his own style to them.) Just as a comic strip, this certainly deserves its spot with the other entries in IDW’s “Library of American Comics” series, though since one of the other entries is The Family Circus you may consider that less than effusive praise (but that strip wasn’t bad at first).

In an anthropological sense it’s interesting to see which characters were more or less set in stone by these strips, and which ones were further developed by the comic books. Archie is pretty much Archie from the beginning, but Jughead still has a long way to go even by the end of this book: he didn’t become a genius con artist until he got his own book, and spends these years as mostly a standard sidekick. Dilton Doily pops up midway through and is fully defined by the end.

But what most of you really want to know is, were Betty Cooper’s psychotic tendencies something that she developed later after years of Archie-chasing, or just an inherent part of who she is? This should answer your question.

This isn’t actually her acting crazy, just ditzy, but I’m amused by the name of the girls’ football team and Reggie’s competing team.

If you’re wondering why Archie isn’t too concerned about Betty’s threats of physical harm (not to mention that warning shot into Jughead), you’ll find that out if IDW puts out a second volume of strips. As a strip from 1949 proves, Archie and Bart Simpson are both victims of casual parental strangling that would make anyone desensitized to violence.

A few Sunday strips by Montana (not included in this book) can be found at The Greatest Ape. Which also includes the daily strip which demonstrates what is known to all viewers of Looney Tunes cartoons: the defining characteristic of teenage girls in 1940s America was addiction to Frank Sinatra.

Update: A couple of other panels I wanted to highlight. One, also from the football-coach storyline, I just like because it’s the kind of deadpan Stan Daniels Turn joke that I always like, and second because it shows how Montana would sometimes put a fully-developed punchline in the first panel of the strip (which this is).

And this other panel surprised me because I hadn’t realized this word was uncontroversial in 1947 — or did it mean something else back then?

ROBERT RODRIGUEZ

Is this irony
Or sincere post-irony?
So identical

THE COEN BROTHERS

Quirky film, dark film
Quirk, dark, quirk, dark, quirk, dark, quirk
Quirkdarkquirkdarkquirk

JAMES CAMERON

Lovely lucid dreams
of immense complexity
shaped by an asshole

GEORGE LUCAS

An old man believes
He can recapture youth’s spark;
Sadly, he is wrong

STEVEN SPIELBERG

Only childlike joy
can now save the universe
(then something explodes)

KEVIN SMITH

Dick joke, toilet joke,
sex joke, an epiphany,
dick joke, dick joke, fin.

RIDLEY SCOTT

The director’s cut
poem of this sense makes more
everything explains

ROBERT ZEMECKIS

Named a volleyball
then thought, “not lifeless enough.”
Thus: Polar Express

TIM BURTON

Johnny Depp appears
within Burton’s haiku. Why?
Obligatory

M. NIGHT SHYAMALAN

The surprising twist
is that this very haiku?
No longer Asian

Every time I hear about the latest college football recruiting/scheduling/conference-jumping/coach-changing/insert-scandal-here scandal, I always hear someone trying to excuse it by simply acknowledging what we all know. “Hey, it’s a business!” they say, as if to imply, “Only foolish and naive people actually believe that crap about ‘the purity of the student-athlete’, pal. That kind of thing went out with Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. Get with the times.”

Which is all absolutely true, but misses the point: The problem isn’t that getting money involved in college athletics taints the purity of the sport and that they should return to the good old days when it was a sport for students, by students; the problem is that if it’s a business, then the college athletes are the employees. And if they’re employees of a business, then they should get paid. Instead, not only do they not get any actual financial compensation for their labor (they get scholarships, which generally include campus housing, but even at the most expensive colleges that usually amounts to less per year than you could make driving a garbage truck–not to mention, the kids aren’t getting as much use out of their scholarship when they have to spend so much time practicing and playing) but in addition to that, if someone other than their employer, the university, tries to recompense them for their labor, they’re suspended from their job without pay. The school gets to make as much money as they want off of the students, but the student has to stay broke to keep their love of the game “pure”.

Some people claim that the college players get valuable football experience that helps them make the pros, but that’s not an excuse either. Minor-league baseball players gain experience and get paid (although admittedly, they don’t make as much as garbage-truck drivers either.) The point is, if we’re going to have college teams serving as farm leagues for the NFL, then college athletes should be paid for their labor the same way every other working American is. Colleges that make millions off of their football programs, then insist they’re simply providing an extra-curricular activity for their students when it comes time to pay the people who are making those millions possible, are exploiting those kids. “It’s a business” isn’t an excuse, because it’s only a business when the people in charge want it to be a business. The hypocrisy of the stance is what people are complaining about, not the fact that money has sullied the sport.

Okay so you are going to a nerd place where the nerds are and you are thinking “right I need a costume.” Everybody understands this. If you are going to be in a giant roomful of nerds then clearly the thing to do is stand out, and you can’t do that by wearing a black T-shirt with an ironic saying on it.

So what con costume will you choose? There are so many options. And with options, come mistakes. Avoid any of the following:

Just about anything from Lord of the Rings. If you and three friends decide that you will altogether march around in costume as the Witch-King riding his giant evil lizard dragon thingy, that is about the only thing that is not played out from this franchise.1 Do not go as Legolas or Aragorn or Third Hobbit On The Left or one of the zombie kings or an orc or an Fightin’ Uruk-Hai or any of the wizards. All the con people will be all “oh, Lord of the Rings, that is SOOOOOO 2006” and then you will not get nerd-laid, which is mostly the point of going in costume to begin with, right? See also: Jack Sparrow, Ben Affleck Daredevil, Xena, anybody from that show with Hercules where they were in space. I think it was called Hercules In Space.

A really, really obscure superhero. When you are leafing through your comics encylopedias and mint copies of The Complete Handbook To The Marvel Universe and wondering if you will ever find love, ask yourself a simple question: will somebody only kinda interested in comics recognize your costume? There’s a reason you see so many people dressed up as mid-90s X-Men at cons. The yellow-and-green Rogue costume hasn’t been in use for years now but you always see thirty or forty yellow-and-green Rogues at a con cause that is when that girl thought Jim Lee was really cool. If you have to explain that you are Lamprey from the Squadron Supreme to everybody, you are already That Guy. Do not be That Guy.

You can make an exception for guys who are obscure but really funny looking. Like Hypno Hustler, for example. People might think you are one of the Fat Albert kids instead of Hypno Hustler, but you will have a giant Afro either way and they will think that it is awesome.

Razor Fist. Or anybody else who does not have hands, or has replaced their hands with thingies. You know what sucks? Not having hands. Me, I like not having to ask people to help me pee. Maybe you can deal with that. If so, then Razor Fist away! But make sure your razor fists aren’t too sharp or you will probably hurt people other than yourself. Actually you’ll probably poke somebody’s eye out no matter how blunt you make the razor fists. Actually I take it back, you should probably just avoid Razor Fist altogether.

Anybody with an eyepatch. Yeah I get that Nick Fury is awesome and everything, but depth perspective is surprisingly important when you are navigating crowds. You are bobbing and weaving along and then a Wolverine is in front of you but you don’t know how far away his crappy looking fake claws are, and how come every Wolverine costume has the claws popped anyhow? I mean, aren’t the weird muttonchops and maybe a cigar enough to say “I AM WOLVERINE”? If I were Wolverine I’d be totally depressed because everybody thinks it’s all about the claws. I bet he has dreams of things other than clawing. Maybe he wants to open up a traveling sushi restaurant. You don’t know him!

Anybody with a moustache. I’ll just break it to you right now: you can’t pull it off. Goatees are okay. But your traditional pencil-thin moustache, or your handlebar moustache, or your Tom Selleck moustache…? These are a recipe for disaster. The bad kind of disaster. I want you to do me a favour, you go look at your high school yearbooks right now. Find the picture of you when you were sixteen and tried to grow a moustache. It will never get any better than that. At least then you didn’t know better!

The Joker from The Dark Knight. Because you will look like a douchebag.

So, with these guidelines in mind, what is the bestest costume ever?

Obvious!

1. Okay, maybe you could go as the giant flaming eyeball on top of the tower, but that’s one very blocky costume. [↩]

A few whiles back I did a list of “reasons I will love comics forever,” which were mostly awesome panels. I haven’t had a lot of those lately; there just aren’t as many moments in comics these days that make me sit up and go “yeeeEEAAAAAAH!” I don’t know if it’s because they’ve changed or because I have. Possibly it’s both. Aging, whether it be you or an artform, can suck in this regard.

But that having been said, I absolutely adore this bit from Prince of Power #4, a scene that is so totally comics that it really couldn’t have originated anywhere else:

1.) FanExpo is growing so fast it’s honestly hard to believe. Five years ago this was just another shitty corp-con where James Marsters was the headliner. This year? Stan Lee. Nimoy and Shatner. Full editorial presence from DC and Marvel (and promises from both that next year FanExpo will have full portfolio review as per San Diego and New York). A horde of others besides. Don’t get me wrong: in many ways FanExpo is still a shitty corp-con. (And certainly not on par for awesomeoness value with the Toronto Comic Arts Festival, of course.) But it’s one that’s exploding. If it keeps growing at this rate, in two years or so it’ll be the second biggest con on the continent after San Diego; it’s already certainly bigger than anything else other than possibly New York.

2.) Of course, it would be really nice if the con organizers would act like they know they have a rapidly exploding convention on their hands, as opposed to, and I am just saying, a bunch of irresponsible idiots. Last year’s FanExpo had major crowding issues in the larger, southern half of the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, so bad that they had to stop selling tickets. This year FanExpo couldn’t get the southern building for the con and, instead of purchasing the reservation from the organization which bought it (something other major cons have done in the past), settled for the smaller northern building. The main hall of the northern building is about half the size of the southern building. When they reached building capacity on Saturday (which happened at around noon), they didn’t tell anybody but let people exit (because there isn’t anywhere worthwhile inside the con to get good) and then didn’t let them back in. If the FanExpo organizers don’t get their heads out of their asses and make sure to get both buildings next year, they’ll have overcrowding issues that’ll probably make this year look wonderful in comparison.

3.) That having been said, the gaming area – off to one side, treated like the idiot stepchild of the nerd community – was full but pleasantly so. Justin Mohareb worked his ass off to provide a solid little gaming convention tacked onto the enormous behemoth groaning beneath its own weight that is FanExpo. It was a lovely experience, especially since I was volunteering and therefore did not have to pay for stuff. Well, if I had wanted to eat breakfast with James Marsters, that would have been extra. But I do not think eggs and bacon become better when you eat them with Spike.

4.) Because I was mostly not doing stuff other than helping people play board games, I didn’t do much con stuff. I generally never do. I made an exception this time and went to the DC Comics “how to get into comics” seminar, which was originally supposed to be Joey DeCavileri’s gig but ended up being Dan Didio’s instead. I want to make something clear before I go any further: whatever my beliefs about Didio’s creative tendencies as an editor, I’m a professional and I know a professional when I see one, and Didio was the consumnate professional. He was polite, honest, friendly, and tried to be as supportive of the attendees as possible without failing to be realistic.

5.) Which is important to note because I didn’t really go to the panel to learn how to get into comics, because frankly I did the research on that years ago and know the score. I went because I wanted to see the competition – this is perhaps not the nicest of reasons, but it’s the truth. The good news, from my perspective, is that a lot of people in that room aren’t interested in writing except on their terms, which is stupid: you have to start compromising to write professionally practically from the first word. You have to cut back against your own indulgences. Somebody commented a while back that one page in Al’Rashad contained the first sentence they considered “Birdian,” and that was entirely on purpose from my perspective; I know my tics better than anybody and I know when not to use them.

6.) A pause from this discussion about writing to say that I saw more people dressed up as the Doctor at this con than I have ever seen anywhere, which is good because the Doctor is a good costume: you get to wear nice clothes and most of them are relatively easy to put together. Only the Third Doctor (lace shirt and archaic jacket), Fifth (cricketer’s dress) and especially Sixth (ugly what-the-hell coat plus whiteboy afro) are a bit hard to manage. Heck, you can convert your Harry Potter costume into a Fourth Doctor easily enough: just don’t put on the glasses and fake scar, and cram jellybabies in your pocket.

7.) Also a good costume: Deadpool. This is because no matter how terrible your Deadpool costume is, people love Deadpool and will say “hey! Deadpool!” at you. If you are very fat and dress up as Deadpool, people might even not call you “Fatpool.”

8.) But I digress back to my original point. Of course, there were the usual band of “my question is HOW DARE YOU SIR” types, but Didio shut them down quite excellently by being both respectful and saying over and over again that their issues weren’t the point of the seminar. The point of the seminar was how to get work for DC in any of the major disciplines. He stressed the often low-paying nature of the gig frequently because he wanted to be honest; he explained to people, patiently, what editors looked for in art submissions multiple times. He said, straight-up, that writers looking to get work at the big two have to basically steal somebody else’s job, which means the bar is higher. Much higher. And of course people got offended by this, because people are stupid.

9.) Writing isn’t a zero-sum game, of course. But publishing, to an extent, is. That’s how things go: there isn’t enough paying work for everybody who wants to get paid to get paid, and if you don’t know that, grow up. Didio was patient with the people who didn’t understand that, as he was patient with the dreamers who want to change the business or grow the field. Dreams like that are great, but they don’t get you hired.

10.) And he was patient with the people who obviously didn’t understand the point of a pitch. Multiple people tried to debate Didio when he brought up “the gun pitch.” I’d heard about the gun pitch before (from Paul Levitz, actually, years ago). The gun pitch is “I want to tell the story of the gun that killed Batman’s parents.” And Didio explained that the problem with the pitch is that it’s not a Batman story, which is of course obviously true: if you’re telling the story of the gun that killed Batman’s parents, it ends when the Waynes get shot, which means it could be a story about any old gun.

11.) The debaters didn’t get it, of course. “Well, I’d like to read a story about the gun that killed Batman’s parents.” But the point of getting hired in any freelance industry is not “I can do this well,” because lots of people can do that. It’s “I can make your life easier if you give me work.” Pitching the gun story doesn’t make anybody’s life easier, because you’re not gonna give that story to somebody you don’t already know and trust.

12.) Another aside: the shopping at this con was miserably bad. When people are essentially paying a premium to get in the door to buy stuff, there should be, and I am just suggesting this, something resembling a sale price. If I can get it significantly cheaper at Amazon, your sale price is probably not very good. This goes for guy selling the Justin Bieber standups too. Especially the guy selling the Justin Bieber standups.

13.) One more thing: if you want to argue with Dan Didio about the gun pitch, it’s really easy. The trick is to make it a Batman story. You can do it in one sentence.

14. “Somebody is killing people with the gun that killed Batman’s parents.” That one’s for free.

Your guest hosts are Luther (again – is he permanent now? I hope not) and Mia Michaels. Enough with the Americans already! Bring back Karen Kain!

Bree and Edgar: dancehall. Second week Bree and Edgar have gotten an urban style, second week it’s been very good, second week Bree has gotten a lot of praise for being merely solid. (Then again, “solid” on this version of SYTYCD is generally better than any other iteration’s “good,” so.) I didn’t quite like this Jaeblaze dancehall as much as the one she choreo’d last year, but this was very enjoyable and a good opener to the show.

Amanda and Denys: contemporary. Perfectly decent routine which was elevated by the dancers’ performances; Denys and Amanda have really good chemistry, and Denys’ stoneface evaporates when he dances in a way that’s really interesting to see. Even though Denys has contemporary training, his extensions are a bit… odd? Not in a bad way, but you can definitely see the ballroominess of his movements, I think. But whatever, this was really impressive.

Kirsten and Jera: paso doble. Oh, dear, Jera’s scowlyface. Francis and Natalli had some really spectacular paso choreography – I mean, seriously great stuff – and the dancing, while not world-class, was certainly very decent, especially considering the difficulty level involved. (That final lift into a backbreaker – what the hell.) But Jera’s scowlyface was so ridiculous-looking as to be parodic, and that’s distracting.

Natalie and Mackenzie: hip-hop. This actually felt like a bit of a house-style crossover, which given that it’s Sho-Tyme choreo isn’t surprising. This was really difficult choreo – and obviously difficult choreo – and Natalie and Mackenzie didn’t quite make it look effortless but they looked good doing the steps and more importantly looked like hip-hop dancers rather than contemporary dancers. Mackenzie was perhaps a bit more comfortable with the footwork than Natalie was, but both were strong.

Claudia and Yonni: foxtrot. This was a daring experiment that went horribly wrong: a slow, dreamy foxtrot set to “Telephone” by Lady Gaga, which is an upbeat song and thus made the entire dance look five times slower than it in fact was (and it was already a slow foxtrot). Naturally, Mia blames the dancers, including Yonni, who has never danced foxtrot in his entire life but hey salsa and foxtrot are both “ballroom” (even though Latin dance and competitive ballroom have very little in common) so he should know how to do that, right? Shut up, Mia. Yonni and Claudia were both perfectly okay dancing this bad idea.

Charmaine and Jeff: contemporary. Your standard Stacey Tookey moment of brilliance with Jeff and Charlene in their element. That is all.

Julia and Jesse: samba. I think I know why TonyNMelanie keeping getting to do choreo for this show despite usually being boring as all hell: they’re very good at isolating the various elements of a Latin dance, which makes it easier to judge a dancer on their merits at performing those various elements. Julia: of course very strong. Jesse: good hip action, but still stiff in the upper body and his work in the paired samba roll was dreadful. Overall routine: boring, as expected.

Danielle and Sebastian: theatre. The judges loved this and I… did not. I thought Sean Cheeseman’s choreography was great (which makes me sound like a judge! “It wasn’t the choreographer’s fault!”), but Sebastian and Danielle both looked clumsy to me: he was falling out of his pirouettes ahead of beat, she stumbled more than a couple of times, and the unison sections were frequently, well, non-united. I thought Danielle’s performance quality in terms of embodying the character was strong, Sebastian less so. Jean-Marc busts out “VID” again because it is the Worst Catchphrase In The World.

Janick and Shevar: krump. L’il C calls himself a “warriographer” about a dozen times (claiming that he just came up with it, uh huh sure whatever L’il C). Janick was very bad in this, I mean holy crap levels of bad. After seeing all the other contemporary dancers tonight nail their hip-hop numbers, Janick was just not up to snuff by any reasonable standard; the force behind her moves was not there and there was no swag in her step at all. Shevar was good. Not great, but certainly capable, and he had the attitude at least.

Kloe and Jonathan: jazz. In the video package Kloe reveals that her nickname is “Orangina” because she routinely wears too much bronzer, and it’s like piercing the veil because, as a guy, now that she has pointed it out I cannot stop noticing it and the entire routine was “god, she’s so orange.” I was lukewarm on Blake’s choreo here; it just felt very standard, somehow. But Kloe and Jonathan danced it well enough and should be safe.

Probable bottom three: Claudia and Yonni, Julia and Jesse, Kirsten and Jera.
Should go home: Kirsten and Jesse.
Will go home: Claudia and Yonni.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

I was watching some clips of ‘The Daily Show’ today, about Glenn Beck and his plan to hold a rally on the anniversary of, and at the site of, Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech. For those of you not paying attention to American politics, this is causing a tiny bit of controversy, on account of how Beck is an unapologetic racist who is espousing philosophies that would make the non-violent King want to punch him in the crotch until his balls implode.

But here’s the thing: Beck and his supporters insist that he’s not racist at all, apologetically or otherwise. They might even pop up in this very comments section to do so. They insist that they’re all good, kind-hearted people who are just espousing principles of common decency and humanity, and the Evil Lib’ruls are trying to shut them up by making baseless, unfounded claims of racism that just happen to be supported by easily misunderstood video evidence.

They’re lying, of course. We know they’re lying, because we have the aforementioned video evidence. They know they’re lying, because there’s not a single person in the world who could be so utterly lacking in self-awareness and basic intelligence as to hold a giant rally for white conservatives on the anniversary of a famous civil rights speech, in the exact same place that speech was held, and not notice that there might be some sort of problem. Beck is being totally disingenuous and everybody knows it including himself, but Beck, like Limbaugh, Hannity, O’Reilly, Malkin, and Ann Coulter, simply refuse to admit that they’re being disingenuous. They have decided that as long as they’re consistent in their denials, the truth of what they’re denying simply doesn’t matter.

And that sounded familiar to me, as I was thinking about how to describe the phenomenon for this column, and I finally remembered this post from the excellent blog, Kung Fu Monkey. (Please read it, I spent a long time looking through the archives for it. Then I got smart and just googled the keywords. But I digress…) What he describes there is the problem of shamelessness, and he describes it perfectly. Glenn Beck has no sense of shame. He doesn’t see any problem with lying, and confronting him on his lies is no use, because he will simply continue to lie. You cannot shame the man into admitting that he’s a terrible person, because he’s such a terrible person that he doesn’t care that he’s lying about being terrible. And he’s got a national TV show.

Now obviously, this isn’t going to last forever. Most of Beck’s sponsors do have a sense of shame, or at least can put a dollar amount on exactly how much they’re willing to sacrifice in order to support a shameless man, and they’re dropping his show in droves. And the remaining ones are being indicted for fraud, because while there are no laws about shamelessly lying on a national television program, there are laws about false advertising, and coincidentally most of the people still selling ad space on Beck’s show are turning out to be fraudsters. But when Beck goes away, someone else will take his place, because these guys have figured out the loophole in the system. Just deny it all. Even if you know you’re lying, even if they know you’re lying, deny it all. You’re not breaking any laws. The only way they can punish you is with social contempt, and you’re already beneath that.

John Rogers hit it perfectly. These guys have found the exploit that allows them to game the system of civilized conduct. That’s why irony is dead: Stephen Colbert and his fellow comedians are trying to make an absurd statement in a serious way, but all they can ever hope to do is match the stuff Glenn Beck is trying to say for real. You can’t even make fun of these guys, because they’re crazier than the craziest satirist’s dreams. All you can really do is hope that people get smart enough to see through their bullshit, and that’s a pipe dream.

Someone broke human behavior. We need a patch.

Yesterday, I was busy with this.

This weekend I will be at Fan Expo here in Toronto. I’ll mostly be demonstrating board games (in the gaming area, natch) as a volunteer all weekend, because I don’t really care about panels and don’t need that much time to go shopping. If anybody wants to drop by and play some games, feel free.

BunnyM asks:

I’d love to hear your thoughts on assorted nerd musicians, who you think works, who doesn’t, and perhaps why.

This is big in my mind at the moment because I stumbled over Kirby Krackle earlier this week completely by accident, and they are consuming my headspace in way that hasn’t happened since I found They Might Be Giants in the early 90′s.

Wow, I am so not the person to ask about this. I just went through my Zune (yes I own a Zune shut up) and found songs that could be classified as official nerd subgenre (as opposed to music nerds like but isn’t definitively nerdy, like They Might Be Giants): one MC Chris, one Optimus Rhyme, one Lemon Demon, one Ookla the Mok. I have about twelve hundred songs on that thing, so that’s .3 percent of my portablized music.

This is not due to lack of exposure, either. People send me links to nerd music all the time; nerds self-promoting, nerds promoting their friends, nerds sharing whatever nerd thing they found this week they think is awesome. (I just checked my email right now and I have an email from Kirby Krackle circa March of ’09 saying they liked a post and I should check them out, et cetera.) I usually give anything that gets sent to me at least a single once-over if it doesn’t look like spam.1 I’ve got a pretty wide range of exposure to nerd music, and my honest admission is that it surpasses Sturgeon’s Law quite handily.

Perhaps that’s unfair to an extent, but moments of musical genius are few and far between in nerd music. Clever lyrics, sure, there are plenty of clever lyrics, but only rarely do they raise above the level of simply making the reference and moving on; the more ambitious gambit tends to be “tell Character X’s story in song,” which is marginally tougher. Musical virtuosity is rarer; competency is generally the over/under, or maybe a bit lower.

The takeaway, for me anyway, is this: moments of genuine brilliance in nerd music are few and far between, and certainly they appear at a lesser rate than in non-nerd music. The number of nerd songs I’ve heard that can match up lyrically, to, say, Eminem on an average day? Fingers on one hand. And instrumentally, if a nerd band can be as consistent as Nickelback – friggin’ Nickelback – they’re already in the top quarter of musicality.2 Tack on top of that a general lack of interest in listening to a song about any given superhero or video game character if it’s not really, really funny and you begin to understand my lack of disinterest in nerd music generally.

(I know in comments there will probably be a bunch of “well you haven’t heard THIS,” and hey, have at it; maybe other readers will find good suggestions in the comments. But my track record for “well you haven’t heard THIS” is “no, I haven’t… and now I see why.” Four nerd songs on my Zune, people. Four songs.)

1. At some point spam artists will figure this out and penis extension pills will come disguised in links for X-Men fan fiction. [↩]
2. Which is not surprising when the general self-ranking of many nerd musicians is nerd first, musician second. [↩]