So far too many people have asked me to do a post about the “ground zero mosque” controversy, and using that phrase just makes me feel irritated because it’s not at ground zero and it’s not a mosque, but using the phrase at least means everybody knows what you’re talking about.

Here’s my problem: I don’t know what there is left to write about. The right people have already pretty much covered every inch of this issue and why it’s a non-troversy. People have talked about how the “mosque” is in fact a community centre with a prayer room, and how if you want to call it a mosque then by the same logic the Pentagon is a mosque. People have talked about how Feisal Abdul Rauf really isn’t anything but a moderate, peaceful scholar and how his “ties” to radical Islamic movements have been overdramatized or fictionalized. People have talked about how this wasn’t a big deal to anybody until the usual right-wing media suspects decided to gin it up into a big deal months after the fact. People have talked about how other people who should frankly know better (I’m looking at you, Howard Dean) are acting as apologists for bigots. And of course, people have talked about how this is a basic issue of civil rights, and how suggesting that all Muslims have to be “sensitive” post-9/11 is the worst kind of assigning of collective guilt, something that should generally be anathema to anybody living in a modern liberal democracy.

And none of it really matters, because “Muslim” is the new “nigger.” Except in a way it’s kind of worse, because the (almost entirely white) people screaming about Muslims nowadays are the ones who either still use the word or who are the ones who never really understood why it was bad in the first place. Everybody knows at least one white person who doesn’t understand why black people get to use the N-word and why white people can’t; to them, the word being bad is completely understandable. Taboo behaviour is nothing new, after all, and they can understand a new type of taboo behaviour, but what they don’t understand is that the reason for the taboo isn’t because the word itself is bad; after all, it’s just a word. “Nigger” is taboo because when someone who isn’t black uses it, it’s one-word shorthand for “you are less human than me based on the colour of your skin.” Which is why black people can use it, because when one black person says it to another, they’re both black and that shorthand doesn’t apply.

If you don’t understand that – or if you don’t care – then you’re not really going to be concerned about the fact that there are many different types of Muslims and the gigantic majority of them just want to live in peace like everybody else, because the idea of living post-racially (as best anybody can; we all have our inherent biases to overcome) is one that requires introspection and an inquisitive mind. Neither of these traits has been terribly evident in the mosque protesters.

I know this season has a buttload of contemporary dancers (nine girls and seven guys out of 22), and this is something I have complained about previously when discussing SYTCYD. On the bright side, though, Canadian dancers crosstrain more than average. So there is that, at least.

Kirsten and Jera: contemporary. This was a perfectly decent opener for the season, entirely pleasant and entirely unmemorable. Honestly, I am striving to remember anything at all about it now. I know they danced and I remember quite liking their lines. That will have to do. I’m not even sure if it was first. I think it was first.

Claudia and Yonni: salsa. TonyNMelanie make their return to SYTYCDCA with a truly blah piece of salsa choreo, all the more unforgivable because Yonni and Claudia are both Latin ballroom dancers; the tricks could have been far more fluid and I’m one hundred percent sure that Yonni and Claudia could have nailed it as easily as they nailed this piece of ugly choreo.

Amanda and Denys: tango. Amanda’s legs are insane and they go on forever. It’s almost inhuman. She wobbled a bit early on in this – clearly not that experienced at dancing in heels – but recovered nicely immediately after and was rock-solid throughout the rest of the routine. Denys was ridiculously good, as you would expect him to be with this right in his wheelhouse.

Kloe and Jonathan: hip-hop. Kloe was very, very rigid through this entire (quite decent) routine by Sho-Tyme. No flow at all. Jonathan was better; his lower body got into the groove quite well, but his upper body was a bit too loosey-goosey and he wasn’t hitting his releases on the arm movements nearly as hard as he could have done. Still, since the routine was pretty step-centric he still came off quite well.

Charmaine and Jeff: jive. And that’s what happens when you blow a big move and can’t recover from it. Charmaine made an effort, at least; Jeff just collapsed and didn’t find himself until the end of the dance. In fairness, having an uptempo jive married to a “soldier has to abandon his girlfriend to go off to war” storyline is kind of weird to begin with, but they really didn’t come up to par at all.

Danielle and Sebastian: Bollywood. This seemed like a really, really simple routine – just all sorts of basic – and everybody knows choreographers will dumb down routines when dancers can’t handle the steps involved, but how much was involved here? Sebastian calls himself “quirky” about seven thousand times and then the judges all call him “quirky” and then Leah Miller calls him “quirky” and I never want to hear the word ever again, because Sebastian seems like a decent person other than this one really annoying affectation.

Janick and Shavar: afrojazz. Very solid work here as CHEESEMAN~! brings the goods, as he is wont to do. When Janick and Shavar were dancing in unison or on their own, they were just excellent; the only stumbles came on the lifts, where Shavar looked a bit tentative bringing Janick up and the pauses were noticeable. Still, better that he execute them well and a bit offbeat than badly, I suppose.

Julia and Jesse: “new disco.” Once again Melissa Williams tries to invent a new genre and once again it’s just jazz dance with a few imported moves (in this case, disco) and once again her choreography is thoroughly disappointing; we’re now in three years of her choreographing for the show and I can’t think of one piece of hers that’s been more than tolerable. Julia owned her performance, though; she has stage presence to spare. Jesse… not so much, not yet.

Natalie and McKenzie: Viennese waltz. This was very nice. I’m not going to go further than “very nice,” but it was definitely that thing. McKenzie’s rise and fall could be a little more pronounced, and their backs could have been firmer in closed position, but on the whole this was perfectly acceptable dancing.

Bree and Edgar: hip-hop. Ah, yes, Canadian hip-hop, where we can grind it hardcore on stage. Edgar absolutely killed this, every single bit of it. Bree was fully committed, and although she doesn’t have Edgar’s hip-hop technique she definitely made up for it with sheer effort. Jean-Marc busts out the “V.I.D.” catchphrase which nobody in the entire universe likes. Stop it, Jean-Marc.

Shelaina Special Substitute Tara-Jean and Hani: jazz. Shelaina tragically broke her foot and, barring some sort of voodoo miracle, is gone tomorrow night without even getting to perform, which probably means they’ll pull a Billy Bell for her next year and let her try to make top 20 again. Tara-Jean is even better than she was last year, which is the way of things. Hani was very good and should be safe.

Probable bottom three: Charmaine and Jeff, Danielle and Sebastian, Julia and Jesse.
Should go home: Shelaina and Jeff.
Will go home: Shelaina and Jeff.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

…well, the ones that weren’t to music by Warner Music Group, anyway. which is a shame because Warner’s Youtube boycott kills most of the great ballroom and also Justin Johnson’s mindblowing tap solo. (That having been said: trust me, watch to the end. The last one in particular is mindblowingly awesome.)

JR (second) reminds me in style astoundingly of Twitch.

No, you haven’t accidentally mis-clicked on an article for Cracked.com. This is still Mightygodking.com, even if I’m not him and I’m totally stealing a gimmick from Cracked’s lists (that are more like crack than Cracked, honestly. Once you start clicking on them, it’s five hours of timesink before you know it.) Because let’s face it: Lists, especially non-comprehensive lists that you can add onto yourself in the comments section, can be fun.

This time, it’s about film adaptations. We’ve entered a true golden age of film adaptations in some ways, especially when it comes to sci-fi/fantasy films; the improvements in effects technology, combined with the general viewing audience’s increasing familiarity with sci-fi tropes, has resulted in increasingly sophisticated and effective adaptations that bring the book (or comic book) to life. But sometimes, I find myself wondering if “faithful” should really be the defining quality of an adaptation. Sometimes, what works for a book doesn’t work for a movie, and vice versa. By way of counter-example, here are five films that changed a lot, but still made excellent movies.

5. Blade Runner. This one is low on my personal list because, despite it being a beloved cult film that influenced a generation of movie-makers, I really don’t care for it. I’ve watched the theatrical cut, the director’s cut, pretty much every cut they put out, and it always feels like a slow, shapeless mess that wastes Harrison Ford’s talents as an actor (or, arguably, where Harrison Ford wastes his own talents as an actor–Ford can be brilliant, but you can tell when he’s not emotionally invested in a project, and he clearly sleepwalks through this one.) But I’m aware that it is much adored by a great many people, and I can appreciate that even if I don’t share it.

And to the extent that it is good, it’s good specifically because it abandons Dick’s original novel; “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” never really looks at the moral ambiguity present in the Replicants, instead taking the claim that they lack empathy at face value. “Blade Runner” admits the flaw in this entire concept, questioning the morality of gunning down people who look human, act human, and may in fact be more human than human. In fact, I’d say that the less faithful an adaptation of this novel is, the better it could be. (Witness “The Wedding Banquet”, which abandons every single aspect of the novel and is absolutely charming. 🙂 )

4. The Collector. This is an interesting one, because in terms of plot, it’s totally faithful to the original novel…but the original novel was absolutely unadaptable in its existing form. For those of you who haven’t read it, it’s a story about a kidnapping told first from the perspective of the kidnapper, then from the perspective of the victim, then returning to the kidnapper’s point of view for the finale. The narration manages the almost impossible trick of making you understand the motives of the kidnapper and even sympathize with him at times (the victim’s POV scenes make her out to be every bit as snooty as the kidnapper’s persecution complex imagines her to be)…right before hitting you in the gut with the final sequences.

The film adaptation doesn’t have the ability to do any of that. But with nothing more than a tiny bit of voice-over narration, it still conveys that same sensibility, solely through the acting talents of Terrance Stamp. His body language and facial expressions convey everything that the film can’t show in other ways, and Samantha Eggar strikes just the right note of ambiguity as the victim (it helps that Eggar shot Stamp down for a date when they were at college. Nothing says awkward like actual awkwardness.)

3. Memento. I’m going to try not to gush here, but…the original short story was a very clever idea, expertly presented in an artfully precise short story. Christopher Nolan then took that idea and used it as the seed for a chillingly brilliant film that explores the nature of revenge in a way that almost no Hollywood movie ever does. Seeing that final/first scene, and realizing where Leonard’s quest for revenge has taken him, is a moment far more powerful than any of the various “Death Wish” clones out there ever deliver. Lots of films talk about how revenge is ultimately hollow, but they usually do that as an obligatory wrist-slap after the hero gets heaping helpings of juicy, delicious revenge that we can vicariously enjoy. “Memento” radically departs from that model (which is equally present in the original short story) and is all the better for it.

2. The Princess Bride. I actually read the book before I saw the movie, and I remember watching the whole thing in a state of constant, low-grade dread because I knew how the book ended. I know there will always be purists who feel that the original, unhappy ending is somehow “truer” (I hear the same thing a lot about “The Little Mermaid”, too) but I think that sometimes we need a little bit of fairy-tale in our life. We need happy endings in stories precisely because we don’t get them very often anywhere else, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with wanting them. And “The Princess Bride” is just an unabashedly beautiful film with plenty of heartfelt moments (I defy anyone in the world not to shed a tear the first time they hear Inigo say, “I want my father back, you son of a bitch.” It’s not exactly a “Memento”-level commentary on the hollowness of revenge, but it gets the point across.) Most interestingly, this is a rare case where the writer and the adapter are one and the same person; William Goldman was undoubtedly proud of his novel, but he wasn’t afraid to kill his children if it resulted in a good movie, and “The Princess Bride” is one of the best.

1. Who Framed Roger Rabbit? If you’ve never read “Who Censored Roger Rabbit?”, the novel that formed the basis for the film, let me save you some time: Don’t. It’s downright inept, a muddled murder mystery full of red herrings and an ending that comes so far out of left field that you might legitimately suspect it to be from another ballpark. But somehow, Jeffrey Price and Peter Seaman managed to throw away the gallons of bathwater and still keep the baby. Almost nothing remains of the original save the barest bones of the central concept–“Toons”, a private detective, and a murder–but those elements make the story what it is. Every change improves the story, and they’re all done with a keen, aggressive eye towards making it all click with audiences. If you ever want to run a clinic on how to rewrite a book into a movie, this would form a core part of the curriculum.

So that’s my five…or at least, five of my many. As always, feel free to add yours in the comments section!

I love (and write) science fiction, but there are a bunch of things that show up a lot in SF movies, novels that have become such a part of the furniture of the genre that nobody bothers to ask whether they make any sense. An unquestioned assumption is not necessarily something that’s implausible or impossible but something that gets plugged into stories like a widget, without any thought on the part of the writer.

For example:

Bionics: Or, as we say in the real world, prosthetics – which are, of course, becoming increasingly common and sophisticated. What they’re not doing is making anyone superhuman. Go take a look at a VA hospital (and by the way, how much of an opportunity did the people behind Bionic Woman remake miss by not making her an Iraq vet?). Nobody there is lifting cars or taking spy photos with their camera eyes; they’re lucky if they can get anything like the former abilities of the limb or body part being replaced, and even if they give an advantage in one area (as Oscar Pistorius’ legs supposedly did) it’s pretty limited. Even if you could make a bionic limb super-strong, of course, the problem is that the hand bone’s connected to the wrist bone, the wrist bone’s connected to the arm bone, and so on, and that whole chain is only as strong as its weakest link. So superhuman strength is pretty much off the menu (you could conceivably build a bionic hand with superhuman crushing power that wouldn’t stress the wrist too much, but that’s about it) unless you replace basically the whole skeletal structure, which brings us to…

Uploading, or cloning for that matter: Not that either of these things are necessarily impossible (though both involve a fair bit of handwaving, especially the copying-memories part of the latter), but neither are they any kind of ticket to immortality for the simple reason that neither an uploaded version of your mind nor a clone with all your memories is you: they are both copies of you, which will no more prevent you from dying than having children will. With that in mind, it baffles me why anyone would want to do either of these. Who would want to have an immortal or, worse, much younger copy of yourself around? How would that take the sting out of aging and death? Not to mention the fact that you would be made to suffer Robert Burns’ most terrible curse: to see ourselves as others see us. Most of us can’t stand to hear a recording of our own voices; imagine that magnified by a factor of a million and you’ll get the idea of just how annoying and uncomfortable it would be to have a simulacrum of you wandering around.

Sensors: Such an innocuous bit of technology, those machines that let Mr. Spock or whoever tell you what’s going on down on the planet. Unfortunately, nothing like them actually exists. For example, one thing people can always tell with sensors is the presence or absence of “life signs.” How do they do that? It can’t be through infrared or heartbeats, since neither of those would be detectable from space (well, infrared could be, but not individual heat signatures) – but the magical sensors usually can not only detect individual life forms but tell you what species it is! Sensors are practically the definition of the unquestioned assumption; they’re such a background element that hardly anyone bothers to think before plugging them into a story. (This goes double for tractor beams.)

Space combat: This is probably the most commonly appearing one on the list, but think about it for a minute. Actual combat mostly consists of one person trying to get to a target, and the other one trying to stop them; a fighter-interceptor trying to stop a bomber, for instance (or disabling the bomber’s fighter escort.) That works all right when your battleground is the sky, because there are a limited number of possible approaches and escape routes. But when the target is a planet that limited number increases until it approaches infinity – so it’s likely that your fighter-interceptors will simply be unable to intercept anything.

Aside from that, though, the notion of space war is equally unlikely. Even if we assume the existence of FTL travel (something that would have been on this list thirty years ago, but which writers have more recently made more of an effort to justify), it’s almost certainly going to take a lot of energy to get from star to star; what could be waiting there that would be worth the effort involved? You might argue, of course, that war pretty much always takes a lot of energy and that’s never stopped anyone, but the fact is that almost everything of value on an inhabited planet can also be found on uninhabited planets, asteroids or comets. Sure, you can come up with some other reason for an interplanetary war – an ideological difference, some genuinely unique resource, a pathological hatred of the colour blue – but by this point you’re either handwaving or actually giving the matter some thought, which means it’s no longer an unquestioned assumption.

Sol III: This is a pet peeve of mine. SF writers figured out a long time ago that aliens wouldn’t call our planet “Earth,” so you often see it referred to as “Sol III,” which sounds much more science-fictiony. The problem, of course, is that “sol” is Latin for “sun,” which means that instead of calling the planet “Earth” you’ve called it “Sun III” – so much less geocentric!

None of these are bad ideas, necessarily – except for that last one – but I’m tired of seeing them recycled over and over like so much dorm room furniture. So here’s my challenge to everyone who writes SF in novels, movies, comics or wherever: the next time you’re about to use one of these ideas, think it through – odds are good that after a few minutes’ consideration you’ll wind up with a more interesting and original story.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a dynamite idea for an epic about bionic space marines I need to work on…

LazyCustomizer:

I’d like to read your opinion of how the Penguin would fit in the Nolan Batman films, and whether you believe Nolan’s determination not to use the Penguin is wise or closing himself off from a potentially interesting story.

Yes and no.

On the one hand, I share Tim O’ Neil’s opinion that the Penguin is one of Batman’s best villains (although I would personally give pre-eminence to the Riddler, but ultimately “best Batman villain” always comes down to what aspect of Batman you like best, and I like Batman best as a detective) simply because the Penguin isn’t crazy; he’s just a straight-up crook. That might not be as otherworldly and scary as the usual Arkham gang of horrors, but it can make for a great villain because the Penguin is just a bastard, plain and simple. No stupid self-destructive plots, no monologuing, no movie-style villain tropes. The Penguin would make a great villain in a Nolan Batman movie…

…except he probably wouldn’t. Because all of the things that the Penguin isn’t are what’s mostly expected out of a Batman movie now: the Bat-villain in a movie has to be crazy-go-nuts because it has becomes received wisdom that Batman’s Enemies Are Crazy. This goes for the comics too, of course; it’s one of the reasons Penguin has generally dropped down the ranks over the past two decades, demoted to basically being a mob boss. But it’s even moreso in the movies, where Nolan is especially interested in the dark theatricality of Batman and his enemies. Nolan’s Scarecrow is obviously insane long before he ever gets dosed with his own fear chemicals; his Ra’s Al Ghul is a weird blend of totalitarian and guerrilla. Part of what makes the new cycle of Batman films tick is that the films explicitly say that the only sane response to this insanity is a different type of insanity. But the Penguin isn’t insane. He’s just a criminal; nothing more than another version of Carmine Falcone, who gets shoved out of the plot halfway through Batman Begins.

Besides, how do you do a “realistic” Penguin? What makes the Penguin a good comic character are those explicitly comicky bits: the trick umbrellas, the monocle and top hat, the birds as weapons. That’s all stuff that won’t fit in a Nolan film; without it, all you’ve got is a pretty bog-standard deformed criminal. Danny Devito’s Penguin in Batman Returns was great (and Returns is far and away the best of the 90s cycle of Batman movies: the best action, the best acting, and the only one that doesn’t feel tremendously dated now) precisely because in addition to being a nasty piece of work he also went in for all the crazy gimmicks. But all that won’t fit in a Nolanverse film, because if you don’t start out crazy in the Nolanverse, there’s no good reason to play dress-up.

So here is the thing. I have never owned a smartphone, mostly on the basis that they are fairly expensive, and although the apps and so forth are appealing, I previously could not in good conscience say that I desperately needed one. This is why my cellphone is a cheap little Nokia that looks like it can call 1999. However, in a few weeks I will likely be in need of a smartphone, assuming everything goes as planned and I begin working at a law firm. A smartphone is essentially part of the whole Lawyer Package at this point, along with “suit” and “cold appraisal of the world.”1

The problem, though, is that I do not follow the smartphone scene as such. I mean, I know the generalities: Android can multitask but is slower, iPhone has more apps but you’re dealing with Apple’s closed-door shop unless you jailbreak, et cetera. I also know that a Blackberry is likely out for a couple of reasons I won’t get into right now.2 But I have no personal experience with either Android phones or iPhones beyond the occasional fiddling with a friend’s phone when they get up to go get a new drink. I don’t know performance specs and have only a very tenuous grasp on killer apps.

Finding good reviews of phones isn’t too hard, but phone reviews from ZDnet and the like are, I figure, often like their other hardware reviews in that finding out what mass experience of the product is like often contradicts what the reviewer’s experience was. Even worse, though, is finding a site for good app reviews: there are so many spam sites dedicated to “app review” that picking my way through them is a chore.

Hence I turn to my readership, because you people are by and large nerds, and nerds often have great smartphones. What are your experiences with iPhones and the various Android models? What should I buy? What are, in your opinion, the killer must-have apps that justify their price?3 And can anybody recommend a good site for app reviews?

1. Lawyers make more lawyer jokes than anybody else. [↩]
2. One of which is that they don’t support a certain type of database integration and the others do. Way to go, RIM! [↩]
3. For example, I don’t care how good your GPS app is; I’m not buying it because $200 is a lot more than Google Maps, which is still free. [↩]

Last Sunday’s episode of For Better or For Worse presents an interesting paradox: the punchline involved John, the husband,writing on a dollar bill, but Canada (where the strip is set) did away with dollar bills in favour of coins in 1987. FBOFW true believers will, of course, remember that creator Lynn Johnston re-booted the strip in 2008; the presence of the dollar bill, though, implies more than a simple reboot, and leads to the suspicion that the 2007 period in which several different timelines appeared simultaneously in the strip was not a simple narrative device but actually reflected some untold crisis in the universe of the strip. Based on the available evidence, we can say that last Sunday’s punchline reflects one of the following possibilities:

• The new continuity takes place in a universe where the world changes more slowly, so that dollar bills are still in use; we can call this the Earth-2 version.
• The new continuity is meant to be a darker, edgier version of the original, and thus is set in the United States; call this Ultimate For Better or For Worse.
• Last Sunday’s punchline was a “rogue joke” that somehow survived the annihilation of the previous timeline. As time goes on, the implications of the paradox it embodies will wreak havoc on continuity and on causality itself, leading to a crossover event in which multiple versions of each character appear and Farley the dog sacrifices himself to save all of the universes.
• Due to the commercial success of the strip, Johnston has as little familiarity with small denominations as George H.W. Bush had with barcode scanners.

Another Toronto mayoral debate, another liveblog.

Non-Torontonians who think I am overselling Rob Ford’s general level of buffoonery: I am really, really not doing that at all.

As is my wont, occasionally I ask people what they would like me to write up on here in this joint. So what would you all like? “I should write” requests, as always, will be ignored, and no guarantees are extended.

(I’d also ask for comment on the idea set forth in comments here, as that was not the first time people have expressed interest in a higher pagerate.)

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.