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As always, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.

Channing Tatum deserves better than a movie that is so bad it deserves to be ranked next to Showgirls in the list of movies that their creators will eventually pretend were meant to be parodies.

I always feel like I should begin a review like this with a disclaimer, so full disclosure: I’ve been reading Paul Cornell’s books since he was transforming Doctor Who novels into something utterly beyond awesome with ‘Timewyrm: Revelation’. I’ve been on a few mailing lists he was on, and there’s a non-zero chance he might remember who I am. So I may have some bias here, is what I’m saying.

That said, ‘London Falling’ really is excellent.

It’s part of the “urban fantasy” subgenre that has become more and more popular over the last decade or so, specifically the sub-sub-genre that involves police getting involved with the supernatural. I’ve read and enjoyed other books in this field of interest (I also highly recommend Ben Aaronovitch’s Folly series. I also admit to bias there too, because ‘The Also People’ was freaking METAL.) This story involves a seemingly untouchable drug kingpin who gets arrested and dies in custody all in the same night. The attempts to investigate his death lead to several members of the crime squad gaining the Sight, able to see the secret London only visible to practitioners of magic.

Cornell makes an absolutely riveting choice in this book by making it clear very early on that Seeing the secret London has absolutely fuck-all to do with knowing what the hell any of it even means, let alone having any control over it or getting magical abilities from it. The book is absolutely suffocating in its intensity at times; the characters have no Wise Mentor, they have no Book of Thoth, they have been dropped into the deep end and it’s sink or swim. And oh by the way there’s a fucking whirlpool over there.

The characters each deal with the craziness in their own way; Costain, an undercover cop, has what can only be described as the most pragmatic religious conversion in human history, while Ross finally gains explanations for the impossible strangeness that’s tainted her entire life. (I’d go into more detail, but I’m avoiding spoilers as best as possible, because there really is a lot of good twisty stuff in here.) All of them share one important coping mechanism, though; they’re all coppers, and they all fall back on their police training. Cornell meticulously researched the novel, adding a layer of authenticity to the real-world aspects that helps sell the more fantastical elements.

The ending does come off as fishing for a sequel just a bit, but not so terribly much that I minded (although I suspect that if you didn’t like the book as much as I did, you might feel a bit more strongly about it.) On the whole, I have to say that I enjoyed this one and I’m looking forward to his next book.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

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As always, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.

In its long, storied existence, ‘Dragon Magazine’ really did a lot to create “gaming humor” as a legitimate subgenre. Think of all the great tabletop gaming comics out there, from ‘Yamara’ to ‘What’s New With Phil and Dixie’ to ‘Dork Tower’ to ‘Knights of the Dinner Table’, and odds are they showed up in ‘Dragon’ at least once. A lot of online comics like ‘Order of the Stick’ wouldn’t be around if not for pioneering strips that said, “Yes. Fantasy is weird and people rolling dice to make it up is even weirder. But isn’t it awesome?”

‘Nodwick’, which also has its roots in ‘Dragon Magazine’, is a comic not so much about the tropes of gaming as about the tropes of the kind of fantasy universe you’d get if the rules of physics were supplanted by the rules of gaming. The heroes are a band of not-too-bright, not-too-heroic adventurers who are more interested in killing monsters and getting swag than in actually doing the right thing. They have one truly good person, the team cleric, but even she has her little blind spots…namely, her belief that healing magic and resurrection spells make it not such a big deal when the group’s fetch-and-carry-and-walking-trap-detector henchman, Nodwick, gets badly mauled on account of being the only person who isn’t an adventurer.

Mind you, he’s also the only person with a drop of common sense, which is where the humor comes in. Nodwick frequently saves the day by being the one who spots the intelligent, easy solution that nobody comes up with because they’re all too busy being fantasy heroes and trying to find the official, genre-sanctioned solution. And even when he can’t get out of the obvious and terrible fate awaiting him (thank goodness for magical healing duct tape!) he acts as a Greek chorus, commenting on the absurdity of the way fantasy tropes work.

But the sneaky thing about ‘Nodwick’ is the way that Aaron Williams slides an actual story into things, right under your nose. Silly villains like the exiled god Baphuma’al eventually become serious antagonists, goofy MacGuffins like Piffany’s first kiss become important plot points, and the whole thing builds to a surprisingly epic finale. Williams is a master at this kind of backdoor worldbuilding (see his superhero comic, ‘PS238’, for another example), and you’re so busy laughing that you don’t even see it coming. When he gives unlimited cosmic power to a hamster who’s also the President-for-Life of the Henchman’s Guild, that’s funny. When said hamster becomes instrumental to the final battle between Good and Evil for the sake of the universe, that is freaking METAL.

I don’t want to get too much into detail about ‘Nodwick’, because the best par of humor is experiencing it for yourself for the first time, so…just take my word for it. ‘Nodwick’ is funny. And it’s also good.

This Toronto Sun article by Julia Alexander is simply bad comedy: a Sun reporter – and for those of you not aware, the Sun is the most conservative paper in the city, a right-wing tabloid rag that makes a point of showing off nearly-naked girls on page five every day – starts out by declaring how she hates cyclists, and then in a spontaneous fit of journalism actually decides to try out cycling downtown. At this point she learns that, whoops, cyclists have it way worse than drivers, and spends two hours scared out of her mind. But, because she is a Sun reporter, Ms. Alexander’s final conclusion is this:

I used to hate cyclists, but I don’t anymore. I understand them, but for things to get better, they need to start understanding drivers, like myself, have needs too.

At which point you just have to throw up your hands and say “no, what actually needs to happen is that you need to fuck off.” Because cyclists understand drivers perfectly well. Most of us do drive cars on occasion, you know; most cyclists are not rabid environmentalists to the point of refusing to drive. We know what it is like to drive a car, and we also know that the majority of drivers simply do not give a shit about cyclists. We know this via statistics and we know it via experience.

This is generally the point where some well-meaning driver just exclaims in frustration that no, they really do care, they just wish cyclists would obey traffic laws. But any experienced cyclist knows this is bullshit, because it is a tossup at any given time whether drivers get pissed at you for disobeying traffic laws or pissed at you for obeying traffic laws. I have literally had drivers get out of their car and shout at me when I was waiting for them to advance at a stop sign. Cyclists know that it is simply a tossup as to whether a driver gets pissed at you for trying to execute a proper and legal left turn or if they get pissed at you because you choose to cross with the pedestrian crossing because you’ve been nearly killed too many times trying to execute proper and legal left turns. It is up to each driver’s individual whimsy! What fun!

Of course, all of this assumes that the driver deigns to acknowledge your existence in the first place, and that itself is a hit-or-miss proposition to say the least. Ms. Alexander confesses that she often opens her door into traffic without checking first, and since the two times I have come closest to getting killed while on my bike were because of drivers dooring me in my goddamn neck and causing me to collapse over towards the middle of the road, I will at least note that she is being honest about something that I think causes more cyclists to think murderous thoughts than any other, but that is all the credit she gets because, you know, there were those near-death experiences and I’m still a little put out about them. Ms. Alexander explains them away in this manner:

Ironically, drivers and cyclists share a similar concern — survival. Cyclists don’t want to be hit by an oncoming vehicle and drivers don’t want to hit them.

Which: no, we don’t share a similar concern. Cyclists are concerned about their own survival. Drivers, when they are concerned about cyclists at all – and again, this is very much a hit or miss proposition – are concerned about somebody else’s survival, and I shouldn’t have to explain that worrying about somebody else’s safety is not the same thing as worrying about your own. If those two things were equivalent then Ms. Alexander wouldn’t be opening her goddamned car door into traffic without looking, or doing all of the other stupid, negligent things drivers do every day when they operate their vehicles, which in case we have forgotten are large and dangerous enough to be able to kill somebody when they are only moving fifteen kilometers per hour.

And this is the thing: I drive as well, and I get it. Driving has become more and more stressful over the years; I would not be surprised to find that the incidence of road rage has increased at basically the same rate that the real median wage has decreased, because the more costly any accident becomes for an individual, the more they personalize their driving experience – where an accident in decades past might have been unfortunate but livable, now an accident means an often-unaffordable increase in insurance premiums and the loss of something vital to many people’s jobs.

More to the point: driving is very, very easy to fuck up! Forgetting to check your blind spot, not signalling a turn, sudden dangerous stops, not obeying traffic signs properly – every driver alive does something wrong at least once per day, because there are simply so many things you can get wrong. On my bike ride home from work each day, I see at least three or four “rolling stops” at stop signs – hey, they’re only stop signs! Really, if I had a nickel for every basic driver error I see each day, I could go buy my own private island, pave it and cycle around on that instead.

But just because I understand that driving is stressful and much more difficult than people assume doesn’t mean I’m sympathetic to this article’s position that this is a teachable moment for all concerned. Because it isn’t. The problem is not cyclists. Yeah, there are a few asshole cyclists out there, but there’s a few assholes everywhere: most cyclists are generally law-abiding. The problem is drivers, because the root of the problem is that every driver wishes that they had the road to themselves, and unlike their relationship with other drivers, the relationship a driver has with a cyclist is inherently an imbalanced one.

So don’t come to me, as a cyclist, and tell me I need to “understand drivers.” Because I understand what drivers want from cyclists. They want them not to be there.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist, and in case you don’t click the SYTYCD Youtube links embedded therein, just fucking watch this:

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As always, you can also go to the dedicated Al’Rashad site.

Much like John Carter, it is a perfectly average piece of genre fiction with some genuinely good bits that was pre-determined to be horrible by people who have not seen it; unlike John Carter, its sins are the result of caution rather than ambition.

1. Trade Rudy Gay to the Cleveland Cavaliers in exchange for Tristan Thompson, Alonzo Gee, Tyler Zeller and draft picks/cash.

2. Exercise draft rights on Tomislav Zubcic, sign to rookie deal.

3. Send Linas Kleiza to spy school. Kleiza learns arts of secret killing.

4. Trade Linas Kleiza to the Dallas Mavericks for a second-round draft pick.

5. Linas Kleiza assassinates Dallas owner Mark Cuban.

6. Send Quincy Acy back to college. Acy majors in theoretical physics.

7. In 2086, an elderly Quincy Acy invents time travel, returns to present day, shares secret of time travel with younger Quincy Acy.

8. Elderly Quincy Acy promptly vanishes in puff of causality.

9. Use the Acy Engine to travel to 1870s America and ensure that Mark Cuban’s wife’s great-great-grandparents never meet.

10. Travel to 1960s and make sure Mark Cuban, instead of reading The Fountainhead, instead becomes obsessed with The Westing Game.

11. Through further time travel, ensure that DeMar DeRozan is made sole heir to Ellen Raskin’s estate.

12. Return to present day. Mark Cuban’s estate donates the Dallas Mavericks to Ellen Raskin’s heir. DeMar DeRozan now owns the Dallas Mavericks.

13. Dallas trades Dirk Nowitzki to Toronto for Andrea Bargnani.

14. DeMar Derozan sits down with New York Knicks owner James Dolan for a game of high-stakes poker, and in an epic hand wins the Knicks from Dolan with three jacks against a seven high.

15. DeMar DeRozan offers to trade the Dallas Mavericks and the New York Knicks, together, for the Miami Heat to owner Mickey Arison. Arison accepts.

16. However, the Knicks were rigged to EXPLODE after the trade takes place. “Caveat emptor,” sneers DeRozan.

17. DeMar DeRozan trades LeBron James to the Toronto Raptors for a set of old encyclopedias, executes a three-way trade with Toronto and the Clippers to send Chris Bosh and Dwyane Wade to the Clippers, Chris Paul and Eric Bledsoe to the Raptors and a set of old encyclopedia dustcovers to Miami, then announces the dissolution of the team.

18. Toronto sacrifices Kyle Lowry to the Dark Basketball Gods. Instantly, the Boston Celtics wink out of existence and indeed never existed in the first place.

19. Toronto spends $50 million to convert Amir Johnson into a cyborg superhuman known as ROBO-BALLER. ROBO-BALLER can dunk from the other side of the court and has laser targeting on his jump shots to give him a .997 shooting percentage.

20. Current-day Quincy Acy goes back in time, assumes identity of Reggie Evans. In present, “Reggie Evans” leads rest of Brooklyn Nets on a “fun trip” to a curiously unlabeled warehouse. They are never seen again.

21. Jonas Valanciunas’s mutant powers emerge. At a pickup game in Indiana he screams “WIKTORY BABY” and the sonic vibrations destroy all of Indiana along with the Pacers.

22. 2013-2014 NBA regular season ends with a Toronto team whose starting lineup is Chris Paul, LeBron James, Clone of LeBron James, ROBO-BALLER, and a giant crocodile with human intelligence named “Dave.” Rest of Eastern Conference has ceased to exist; teams not destroyed in pre-season are eaten by Dave.

23. Despite this, during the NBA Finals, they still lose in six games to the San Antonio Spurs.

24. I dunno, tank for Andrew Wiggins, I guess?

The Matrix: Given that we perceive the world entirely through our senses, the ultimate nature of reality will always be subject to irreconcilable doubt.

The Matrix Reloaded: Why yes, the Wachowski Brothers would like large sums of money, thank you very much.

The Matrix Revolutions: If your agent is good enough, you can get a $110 million dollar sequel greenlit before anyone even sees the movie it’s following.

The Terminator: Even though it might feel like you’re an ordinary person powerless to affect the vast sweep of history, you can do more than you might think.

Apocalypse Now: It’s easy to lose your perspective on “sanity” when you get too far away from other people.

Cast Away: It’s easy to lost your perspective on “sanity” when you get too far away from other people.

Road to Perdition: You will never truly understand your father, and you will always miss him.

The Lion King: In a world with limited resources, it’s just better that a privileged class of rulers takes the majority of the food and leaves everyone else struggling over scraps, and trying to change this is evil.

Grave of the Fireflies: No matter how just your cause, when you go to war you will turn people into victims.

I, Robot: Racial prejudice is entirely justified, and all those people who think we can get along are just dupes blinded to the secret cabal who rules the world and plans to murder us all when the time is right!

The Dark Knight: Being a hero sometimes means sacrificing your own personal happiness.

Jurassic Park: Treat the “little people” nice, because they can make your life a living hell if you screw them over.

Resident Evil: Biological warfare is an ultimately suicidal pursuit.

Twilight: Dysfunctional, sociopathic stalkers are sexy because they’re really into you!

King Kong: Wild animals don’t make good pets, and are best appreciated in their natural habitat from a safe distance.

The Shining: It sucks when you’re a kid and parents get a new job that uproots you from your familiar environment.

Room 237: Postmodern film critique can lead you down some pretty fucking crazy rabbit holes, dude.

Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth 2150 AD: It would really have sucked if the Nazis had won World War II.

Stargate: No matter how hard it seems, you have to let go of the past or you might as well be dead.

The Wishmaster: A clear head and the ability to think on your feet are immensely valuable.

The Omen: As much as you love your children, they’re always going to be a living reminder of your mortality and that’s always going to be faintly unnerving.

Friday the 13th: Sometimes people will blame you for shit you didn’t even do, and they can’t be reasoned with.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Hedonism isn’t as bad as some people proclaim it to be, and only uptight prudes get upset about casual sex and transvestitism…and, um, murder…and…er…cannibalism.

Quarantine: Authority figures prefer to operate in secret primarily because they don’t like to be held accountable to the general public for their actions.

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey: Risks are worth taking, because ultimately they (sentence to be continued next year)

Jim already covered a lot of ground yesterday, a lot of which I concurred with and sort of pre-empted chunks of my post, but I’ve got a few things to say (spoilers after the cut).

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