…it looks like it’s time to short Washington Mutual.
Canadians should be thankful for the essentially risk-averse nature of Canadian banks. If anything gets us through this shitpile, it’s going to be that.
17
Sep
…it looks like it’s time to short Washington Mutual.
Canadians should be thankful for the essentially risk-averse nature of Canadian banks. If anything gets us through this shitpile, it’s going to be that.
17
Sep
I’m going to be on Q, CBC’s arts radio show, tomorrow (Thursday) in between 12:30 and 1, talking about the new TV season in my role as Important Critic Person ™. That’s CBC 1, or for those with satellite radio, Sirius 137.
EDIT: Or, duh, on the internets.
17
Sep
THE TORIES “WIN” THE CANADIAN FEDERAL ELECTION IF: They get a majority. That is the goal, pure and simple, and the only way they get an unqualified victory is if they get a majority. This is because financial indicators for the near future are frankly really bad (even with the Canadian banks having more of a hedge against the financial maelstrom forthcoming everywhere else than most other countries’ banks). If the Tories don’t get a majority government, they’ll be stuck with another minority, and then the Liberals will, at their leisure, force an election when they’re stronger and when the Tories are weaker thanks to being in charge during bad times. If the Tories get a majority, they can hope to ride out the next four years and maybe things don’t suck by the end. If they don’t, they’re in trouble, and everybody knows it. Of course, that’s why they called the election now; they’re trying to wring the most out of their current state of advantage.
THE TORIES “LOSE” THE ELECTION IF: If they don’t see any gains in Ontario. If they don’t see expected gains in Quebec. If their seat count in Parliament doesn’t raise by at least five seats. (Ten to fifteen seats would, given the political facts on the ground, essentially count as a tie.)
THE LIBERALS “WIN” THE ELECTION IF: They don’t collapse. This is the rare moment in Canadian history where the Liberal party could legitimately fall apart for another decade if not longer; they have a leader who is not well liked (although I think Dion gets a bad rap), and no real champion waiting in the wings (Bob Rae? Michael Ignatieff? Zzzzzzz). It is possible (not likely, I think, but certainly possible and not unfeasible) that the Grits could be reduced below 45 seats in this election – a trouncing that bad would put the party in the wilderness for years and shove the NDP forward as a serious alternative for many centre-left Liberal voters.
THE LIBERALS “LOSE” THE ELECTION IF: If they lose a lot of seats to the NDP. If they get cleaned out in Quebec (the nightmare scenario, and not impossible at this point). If their popular support in the Maritimes or Toronto shows signs of seriously fading.
THE NDP “WINS” THE ELECTION IF: They continue their slow-but-steady seat increase as they have over the past few elections. Whatever one can say negatively about Jack Layton (STOP WITH THE FUCKING ROBOCALLS, JACK), you can’t say that he hasn’t pulled the party out of its late-90s doldrums. This time around, the NDP is looking to capitalize on its by-election win in Outremont (its first Quebec victory in, like, ever) with another victory in Gatineau or Hull, and to continue its steady and gradual growth in the Maritimes by taking seats in Newfoundland (where the Tories are stumbling thanks to Danny Williams being a pugnacious asshole). They even have a shot in Oshawa thanks to the auto manufacturing crisis on Ontario. The ideally realistic NDP scenario is a growth of five to ten seats.
THE NDP “LOSES” THE ELECTON IF: Thomas Mulcair is defeated in Outremont; the Liberals steal their expected Maritime seats; NDP ridings that should be more or less locks (like Trinity-Spadina) go Liberal instead.
THE GREEN PARTY “WINS” THE ELECTION IF: Elizabeth May wins her seat in Central Nova. This is their only realistic shot at winning a seat on their own merit, and it is, seriously, put up or shut up time for the Greens. Disaffected voters will only flirt with a fringe party for so long before they expect it to become competitive, and the Greens’ fifteen minutes are almost up.
THE GREEN PARTY “LOSES” THE ELECTION IF: May doesn’t win. Period.
THE BLOC QUEBECOIS “WINS” THE ELECTION IF: They manage to hold back the rising rural Tory tide in Quebec. The Bloc currently have 48 seats; after the election, if they manage to keep more than 40 of them, they’ve done extremely well. And you know they’re desperate; when Gilles Duceppe says he wants to attract federalist votes in Quebec, that’s when the Bloc is in dire straits indeed.
THE BLOC QUEBECOIS “LOSES” THE ELECTION IF: They drop below 30 seats, which would be a drubbing. If they drop below 25, expect to see defections in the ranks. Like the Liberals, this is an election which can potentially send the Bloc into the politicla wilderness; unlike the Liberals, who will always eventually resurrect themselves and take back the reins of power, the Bloc could simply dissolve if things go badly enough.
17
Sep
Do you every worry about whether you could handle it if you were suddenly teleported to a world where humans and giant dogs communicated through telepathy and engaged in contests of sport?
Well, Rex doesn’t. Because he is the motherfucking Wonder Dog.
16
Sep
This is fucking brilliant.
16
Sep
(SCENE: a nondescript hotel room, covered with paper, the television tuned to CNN. JOSH, TOBY, SAM, DONNA, and CJ are sitting around the room in various states of concentration.)
SAM: (reading aloud) “This election is important, not because it is about change but because it is about choice. As a politician, I choose to present you with facts. My opponent chooses to lie to you. Your job is to choose as well – but the other guy doesn’t want your job to be easy.”
TOBY: Shift from formal speech to informal conversation. Wait, did I say informal? I meant “folksy.”
SAM: Folksy?
TOBY: From my lips to L’il Abner’s ears, yes.
SAM: What’s wrong with folksy? People like folksy.
TOBY: How about he’s not folksy? How about it comes across as inauthentic? Like he’s trying to get people to like him?
CJ: But we are trying to get people to like him.
TOBY: There’s a fine line between charismatic and pathetic. You are jumping, you are vaulting over that line.
SAM: I’ll rewrite it.
Silence. Then:
JOSH: When did people stop doing math?
DONNA: For me, that would be grade eleven.
JOSH: I don’t mean – look. He’s promising to increase military spending and cut taxes, and his entire plan for not making the country go broke is cutting earmarks. That’s like you trying to pay off your credit card by saving your change when you buy gum.
DONNA: I don’t have that much on my credit card.
JOSH: Yes you do.
(Pause.)
DONNA: There was a sale on widescreen televisions.
JOSH: You watch the news and “Grey’s Anatomy.”
DONNA: And I can see every last one of their pores in glorious high definition.
JOSH: But you watch the news. Donna, how is the fiscal outlook of the United States right now?
DONNA: Are you asking me or are you asking the campaign’s press secretary?
JOSH: I’m asking you.
DONNA: Then it’s pretty bad.
JOSH: Then why does he think he can just yell out “tax cuts” and everything will work?
CJ: Because both parties spent years convincing the American electorate that we were on the wrong side of the Laffer curve and we needed to cut taxes in order to make the government more efficient and put more money in voters’ pockets.
JOSH: I know, but wouldn’t you think they’d have figured out we were all full of crap yet?
CJ: You’d think.
Silence for a while, then:
TOBY: I can’t take this any more!
JOSH: (checking watch) Who had eight-thirty to nine o’clock in the pool?
SAM and DONNA and CJ: (in unison) Charlie.
JOSH: Why do I ever let that kid gamble?
TOBY: How do I do this job? He just lies and lies and lies and nobody gives a damn!
JOSH: We do.
TOBY: You don’t count.
SAM: Black voters do. Hispanics do. Younger –
TOBY: Yes, Sam, thank you, I needed a description of the Democratic Party’s traditional base, now how about independent voters? You know, the stupid ones? I mean, I knew they were stupid, we spend most of every other year catering to their stupidity, but I thought until now they were just dense and uninterested, not actively handicapped!
JOSH: Look, we knew we’d have to grind this one out.
TOBY: This isn’t “grinding it out,” Josh. Every day they lie. Phyllis Schafly’s hot daughter is on the campaign trail every day lying – not shading the truth, not trying to make a bad thing look better, she’s just lying every time she opens her goddamn mouth about things that are in the public record for anybody to see!
CJ: Toby, the press –
TOBY: The press! The press! The press is useless, CJ! Worse than useless! Never mind that this year the choice comes down to a gifted young leader and the Cryptkeeper and they want “balance” – you know what they call them? “Distortions.” Not lies. “Distortions.”
DONNA: “Distortions” doesn’t sound that good.
TOBY: It sounds better than “lies” and that’s all that matters. People who don’t follow politics know what “distortions” are – they’re what you get when a politician tries to make something average sound good. But this – I don’t know to fight this. We call them lies, everybody will get caught up in a big round of “everybody does it” and nobody cares. Worse, we destroy what we’ve got – a guy who people think doesn’t like it because he doesn’t like it. We’re walking a razor here and I’m out of ideas.
(Pause.)
JOSH: I vote for beer.
TOBY: Is that your answer to this?
JOSH: It’s my answer to needing beer. Come on, Toby, let’s go get a drink and then come back and tackle it fresh.
(All rise and proceed to exit. From out in the hallway…)
SAM: You know, he jumps from formal speech to folksy all the time when he writes his own stuff.
TOBY: Great. Let’s get him a straw hat and have him hum the tune to “Hee Haw.” I bet that puts Alabama in play.
15
Sep
To all those people emailing me to complain that the political Magic cards post was “too biased for the Democrats,” my response is thus:
(image via Weasel King)
15
Sep
My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.
15
Sep
One of the reasons I think the Waid/Kitson threeboot version of the Legion was fatally flawed from the outset is that its concept of making the Legion an oppositional force was wholly at odds with the core Legion concept, which tends to be utopian and status-quo defending rather than revolutionary and game-changing. Sure, you could argue that the revolutionary nature of the Legion was heroic in and of itself since they were rebelling against a stagnant society which needed them, but Waid started sabotaging this practically from the first issue by writing numerous Legionnaires’ characters as dilettantes, thugs or cynics. More realistic, maybe, but it’s the type of realism I think is somewhat misplaced in my comic book about teenaged superheroes in the far future.
Worse is that in practice, the revolutionary concept only really has one story hook to go with it, which is “Legion versus entrenched authority.” Comic creators of all stripes have come back to this trope again and again and largely without exception the stories are subpar. (Example of an exception which proves the rule: the v4 Earthwar saga, wherein the Legion fought entrenched authority that was corrupt and evil, namely the Dominion which had quietly taken over the Earth. That is fine. Of course then about twenty issues later we had the “outlaw Legion” arc, which sucked so hard it created its own portable vacuum.) The Legion, from my perspective, is interesting when they fight supervillains – the concept is primarily one with its roots in space opera and traditional superheroics, and I don’t think it lends itself well to stories attempting to deconstruct social politics in this regard. (In others, it can excel.)
Truthfully, I think a large part of the fondness for Geoff Johns’ “I Can’t Believe It’s Not The Paul Levitz Legion” exists because the current Legion seems so fundamentally detached from the traditional superheroics typically associated with the team. Jim Shooter’s run has largely been marked by a vivid feeling of jumping through hoops to give the new conceptualization of the team lip service, resulting in the joyless vaguely-superheroic process stories that I loathe combined with soap-opera plotting.
But the answer to all of this is simple. It is painfully simple.
Shove the series forward a year.
After all, back during the “One Year Later” event post-Infinite Crisis (which almost entirely backfired, but that’s not really relevant here), the Legion was unique in that it didn’t advance a year, presumably because Waid didn’t want to bother and because in a series a thousand years apart from the rest of DC continuity there wasn’t any need. But a one-year gap gives a writer carte blanche to change the social status of the Legion as he sees fit, because in a superheroic universe a hell of a lot can happen in a year’s time.
What’s more, the one year leap creates a jump-on point for new readers, if handled correctly, and stimulates excitement among older readers. Legion fans may now debate the merits of the Keith Giffen v4 “five year gap” Legion, where Giffen (and Tom and Mary Bierbaum) shoved the series forward five years, but when they debate it they’re arguing about the execution of the story and whether the plotting and characterization were good or bad. I’ve never seen anybody suggest that the five year gap wasn’t a good idea in and of itself. Creating an instant in media res situation for all readers is exciting, and with proper followup can become epic.
Imagine, the first page of a new issue. A starfield on inky black, with thick white text covering the page, not unlike a still version of the scrolling text in Star Wars movies.
It is one year since [insert events of previous storyline here.]
The Legion of Super-Heroes is stretched to its breaking point. The Controller Virus decimated the Science Police in every major star system, and now the newly-named Science Pirates attack interstellar shipping routes with every passing cycle. Sensing weakness, criminals and outlaws now attack throughout the United Planets constantly. Only the Legion stands between them and the starvation of every outlying frontier colony on the Rimward Fringe, thanks to a desperate United Planets giving them full enforcement authority.
Other problems abound. The Khund, silent for centuries, renew the operation of their warfactories. Scientists report an increase in inexplicable gravitic anomolies. The genius race of Coluans faces near-extinction in the face of the Lemnos Plague, even with Titanian medipaths working around the clock for a cure. Orandian refugees cluster on Earth, demanding recognition and planetary allotment as the independent nation of New Orando. Rumours swirl that the Robotican Front has finally built the M.E.S.S.I.A.H. which will free them from organic bondage.
And Brainiac Five has been missing for seven months.
14
Sep
I’ve been seeing this diary start to get passed around the internets as “proof” of the John McCain campaign’s ineptitude – that they didn’t buy McCain Foods’ hyperlink before the campaign.
People. McCain Foods is fucking gigantic. They make about six billion dollars a year in revenue and they’re a Canadian company so there isn’t really even the influence-peddling issue to consider – if they’re going to bend over for anybody, they’ll bend over for the Tories, not some dinky little American presidential campaign that’s spent less in two years than what McCain Foods makes in two weeks.
Also, consider:
Anybody who can make an advertisement like that (and McCain Foods ads are legendarily crappy, trust me) does not fear John McCain’s wrath, is what I am saying.
14
Sep
By now you are probably aware that Tina Fey showed up to play Sarah Palin on the season premiere of Saturday Night Live. (You likely discovered this by reading that great newspaper, The Picayune-San Francisco Unsurprising News Digest Of The World.) And if you haven’t seen it yet, no doubt there is video of it somewhere for you to watch, and you will see Fey and Poehler just fucking ramming their knives into Palin’s back, portraying her as a brainless ditz with no business running for vice-president.
This is good news. It is not good news because they made fun of Sarah Palin. Lots of people can make fun of Sarah Palin, because it is so goddamned easy to make fun of her (without having to resort to sexist arguments like “can she do the job with five kids,” which would never be asked of a man). She is the political equivalent of a pinata. So that’s not why it’s good news.
It’s good news because SNL is the heart and soul of conventional wisdom. (It wasn’t always, but has been for well long enough now.) It survives almost entirely on predictability and repetition, and on safe, non-edgy comedy above all. If SNL has, as an entity, decided that Sarah Palin = Dan Quayle 2.0, that means that this is the narrative that pop culture as a whole has deemed appropriate for Palin, and that narrative will siwftly and surely take root throughout both pop culture and then the traditional news media, who love nothing better than a pre-delivered story so they don’t have to waste time with original thought or actual reporting.
And with that narrative, Sarah Palin steadily goes back to being what she always was: a motivator for her own political base and little more. Furthermore, it has the potential to shift the race away from Palin vs. Obama (which is where it is right now) back to McCain vs. Obama. That’s a fight the Republicans desperately do not want to have, because they’ve spent the past month campaigning so dirty that McCain’s “honorable soldier” shtick lies in tatters, even in the media.
13
Sep
I’ve said before that I think people who believe Pakistan to be a Musharraf away from Islamic theocracy to be wildly overconcerned, considering that the main conflict in Pakistan is between secular conservatives and secular moderates. This story serves as further evidence for my view.
11
Sep
– Early favorites: TK the classical-music-breaker (who can solve a Rubik’s Cube in 45 seconds!), Lisa the cocky contemporary dancer, and the trampoliney-guy who mixed some amazing aerials into a reasonably good contemporary routine.
– Leah Miller is a black hole where charisma goes to die.
– Tre Armstrong looks to be a staggeringly good judge – she’s intelligent, observant and eloquent in her praise and criticism. Judgewise she is like a more lucid version of Li’l C. Also she is hotter than Li’l C, which is good.
– Bitchy Blake from America’s Season 1 is a judge and a choreographer for this show. This is so wonderful it makes bad people die inside a little bit. And then he shows up when the judges are about to send someone packing and DEMANDS that the guy be allowed to do his choreography, because he is Blake Fucking McGrath and he Gets What He Wants Dammit. HE IS SUCH A FUCKING DIVA AND IT IS FANTASTIC.
– I was prepared for Mary Murphy’s guest appearance to be as bad as Mary Murphy can get, but she was remarkably restrained for Mary Murphy. That is about the best you can hope for, really.
– My one concern at this point is that this show will follow the Canadian Idol path: namely, that the rest of the country will once again indulge their passion for hating Toronto and vote down Torontonian dancers over, ahem, slightly less talented dancers from other parts of the country, which is what happens on Idol every fucking year.
(Non-Canadians will not understand this, but you know how Americans from not New York City have this strange antipathy for New York City? Take that antipathy, multiply it by a factor of fifty, and you have what non-Torontonian Canucks think of Toronto. Which, speaking as a Toronto resident, I can assure you we simply don’t understand. My working theory is that Toronto-haters are working out their massively depressing envy in a fashion not unlike a third-grade boy smacking around the girl he secretly likes.)
11
Sep
Once upon a time, there was Aquaman. And comics fans looked down upon Aquaman, and they saw that he was Good.
Well, not good exactly, but tolerable. In that way that, like, Poindexter from Revenge of the Nerds was tolerably entertaining. Sure, Poindexter wasn’t Lewis or Anthony Edwards or Booger or Takashi or the gay black guy, but when he was onscreen, you didn’t actively hate him. Like you hated Ogre. Oooooh, how we all hated Ogre! Until he became a good guy in the sequel. Or like how we hated Ted McGinley’s smug jock, until in the third movie (yes, there was a third movie, and a fourth! They even got James Cromwell to come back for the fourth movie? Why? Blackmail!) when we found out that secretly he liked using MS Office.
I am getting away from my point here, which is that although Poindexter was not particularly compelling or anything as characters go, it was funny when his crotch went up and down of its own accord. And then he played electric violin and that was pretty cool.
Anyhow, Aquaman is like the Poindexter of the DC universe. He is not a nerd or anything (he will kick your ass underwater and sometimes his hand is a hook, and do you want to gamble that you get him on a no-hook day? I thought not), but there is no large group of Aquafans desperately demanding the return of Topo as the aquatic equivalent of a furry or anything like that. (Although we did in fact get that.) People just say “huh, Aquaman, all right then.”
I am still getting away from my point here, which really has little to do with Aquaman per se because this is about the Marine Marauder. Who is kind of like Aquaman, but with breasts because she is a woman person. And, interestingly – according to her writeup, anyhow – a lazy one, too! Because it looks like she didn’t invent her powers (talking to fish – sorry, “commanding sealife”), but instead stole them from her brother, who was also the Marine Marauder, although presumably not one with breasts. (Unless he is out of shape.) You would think that a Who’s Who writeup would try to explain these things more definitively, wouldn’t you? I mean, I bet if you touched Roy Thomas with this issue, he would start to burn upon contact, just because it’s so vague.
(Geoff Johns, meanwhile, would become compelled to explain how the Marine Marauder fits into his 328957-part History Of Everything In The DC Universe Ever.)
But I like Marine Marauder. Because she is a girl who decided, from an early age, that she wanted to be rich without doing any work, and so chose the obvious path of becoming a marine biologist and then using fish to rob cruise ships. I’m sorry, but any girl who decides upon that on a life path has to be insane in bed, and as we all know, the only reasonable capacity for judging the value of a female fictional character is how good she would be in the sack. (Especially when her costume essentially consists of arrows pointing at her erogenous zones.) Hence:
Also she has a nice costume, and pretty hair. Why does her costume have a mohawk on it when she has nice hair? That doesn’t make sense. Someone get her a personal shopper.
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