My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Click on thumb to see full

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

‘Smash Up’, by AEG, is pretty much a do-it-yourself version of all the “high concept” stories out there that slap two memes together as a substitute for actual creativity. You know the kind of thing I’m talking about, right? The ones where some screenwriter says, “Oh, zombies are big right now, and steampunk is very in…I’ll make a ‘steampunk zombies’ movie! I’ve earned my million bucks!” Luckily, ‘Smash Up’ gets all the good ones out of the way quick so that you don’t have to waste your ten bucks watching the inevitable ‘Pride and Prejudice and Zombies’ adaptation.

The game has eight factions (Zombies, Aliens, Dinosaurs, Pirates, Wizards, Robots, Ninjas, and Tricksters–your basic leprechauns/gremlins/sneaky mythic beasties) with an expansion on the way that adds four more (Steampunks, Ghosts, Killer Plants, and for some reason Bear Cavalry.) Each faction has a deck; each player picks two factions and shuffles them together into one bigger deck. So in one game, for example, my Zombie Dinosaurs will vie for supremacy with your Robot Ninjas (and Bob’s Pirate Wizards and Jane’s Trickster Aliens…the game is rated for 2-4 players.) Each faction has its own particular strengths; Zombies, for example, have loads of cards that come back out of the discard pile for more, while Dinosaurs have the biggest and stompiest minions. Part of the trick is picking combos that work well together.

You don’t directly duke it out, though; you each work to conquer a series of bases operated by hapless humans. Each base has a “breakpoint” (the total amount of minion power needed to conquer it) and a point total (the amount of points that the base is worth.) When enough minions are at the base to reach the breakpoint, the base is scored; the winner gets the first number of points, the runner-up gets the second, and third place gets the third number. (In a four-player game, player four is SOL.) Any minions at that base then get discarded, and a new base is drawn to replace the old. Whoever gets to 15 VP first wins.

Play is very simple: You can play one action card per turn, one minion card per turn, and then you draw two cards. But the action and minion cards pretty much all have special abilities, each of which reflects the abilities of the faction, and so a lot of complicated strategy comes out of those very simple rules. If you have zombie pirates and a base near breakpoint, you can play a Saucy Wench to kill your opponent’s minion, then row over a Zombie Lord in the Dinghy to score the base and get first place. Then, on your next turn, you can play They Keep Coming Back to replay the Zombie Lord…and, in the process, play two extra minions at the other two bases. The mechanics are easy to learn, but it feels like you’re constantly discovering new tricks to pull off.

The game is fishing for expansions a little too obviously (you know that they’re going to be coming for your money again and again when the box has slots for sixteen extra factions beyond what it comes with) but it’s got a lot of replayability, and it’s simple enough to teach in under five minutes. It’s also easy enough to master the rules to play with your kids, which is nice, because they’re going to want to play any game that lets them make Dinosaur Ninjas and Zombie Wizards. I’d recommend it as a fun party game and a light break between longer and headier games.

These floorplans of apartments and homes from TV shows are amazing.

Generally, when it comes to sports owners pleading poverty every time they have to renegotiate with players, I am completely unsympathetic. The “always side with labour over bosses” rule is never stronger than when one is talking about pro sports, because without the players there would literally be no product, and sports owners are some of the worst examples of management crying poverty that there ever have been – where their franchises have not become profitable and ridiculously appreciated in value over time (particularly in an era where they can very easily blackmail communities into handling much of their expenses), it is usually because of mismanagement on a scale that is truly ludicrous (cf. the Maloof brothers, owners of the Sacramento Kings, who have turned a traditionally profitable small-market team with a crazy-passionate fanbase and a city willing to help pay for an arena into a neverending disaster) and even then mismanagement is no guarantee that the franchise will not continue to be profitable anyway.

Ridiculous salaries? The teams are making the money, and the players are the reason the teams are making the money; really, the salaries are much more justifiable than the fact that the owners in most leagues usually end up taking about half of all the money the teams make on the basis that they own the team brands and pay the cheerleaders and such. LeBron James has the league maximum contract and, based on his personal fanbase, brand power, ability to help a team compete and everything else that comes with being the best basketball player in the world, he is widely regarded as being underpaid.1

But LeBron is underpaid not because he does not have a maximum contract, but because other players – like Rudy Gay or Joe Johnson, for example – have maximum contracts as well. If Rudy Gay is worth $14 million per year, then LeBron must comparatively be worth much more than that – or so the argument goes. Of course, you can as easily argue that Gay and Johnson2 are overpaid rather than LeBron being underpaid – but this only works if you accept that the salary cap determines actual maximum player value, rather than being, oh, a totally artificial construct that owners demanded long ago in order to maintain the illusion of parity between small market and large market teams and to give them bargaining power over players.

But why, then, are the likes of Gay and Johnson paid so much? The answer is a bit more than “because teams can.” Rather, it is because every free agent signing or contract extension that rewards a good-but-not-superstar-level player with a maximum contract – Gay, Johnson, A’Mare Stoudemire, Deron Williams, et cetera – is done because a team wants to win. NBA players – and pro athletes playing in team sports generally – chase two things: money and prestige. Money is self-explanatory. Prestige is playing in large markets, playing for an organization that wins titles regularly – your Celtics, your Yankees, your Man Uniteds – and winning titles. This means that franchises with a track record of success (and let’s be honest: these are usually, but not always, large-market franchises, because they have more money and because top players want to play in big cities where there are more fun things to do and you will be more famous) will always have more ability to sign good players than small-market teams that have no history of sustained competitive success.

Which means that small-market teams – or teams like the Toronto Raptors, who aren’t technically a small-market team, but who get treated like one because it’s Canada – feel, rightly or wrongly, that they have to overspend in order to get quality players to stay in their town. This is not exactly true, but it’s true enough in a league where two teams (Boston and the Lakers) have won about half of the championships. So GMs overspend on players to create the sense that they are where The Good Players Go To Play so they can sign some more players – who also end up being overpaid when GMs try this strategy. And sometimes this strategy works (the Miami Heat). And sometimes it does not (the Raptors).

And I have been trying to figure out how the league might stop doing this, but I am hamstrung in two respects. Firstly, it’s a classic prisoner’s dilemma – if one team says “WE will overpay the good players” and nobody else does, then they will get their pick of the best players and while they might not be the best team, they will be very good and competitive for a few years (which is the point because GMs don’t stick around a team forever anyway and they want their tenure to be successful) and if they’re very good and competitive for a few years then the odds that players will begin to view them as a good place to play will increase. (It happened to the Houston Rockets, and Houston the city is, well, kinda shitty.) And there’s not a good way to rule around prisoner’s dilemmas that I can think of.

And second, like I said – this problem exists because of an artificial construct on player salaries that the bosses use as rhetorical and real leverage whenever they like, so I am not particularly inclined to want to solve it in the first place.

1. Since a lot of nerds read this blog I am anticipating the usual bunch of “well I don’t even WATCH sports and I don’t GET sports” comments. Dear nerds: there is quite possibly nothing more fucking annoying than that in the entire world, except when you are misogynistic and/or homophobic. So don’t do it. Don’t do the other bad things either. [↩]
2. Yes, yes, get your snickering fit over with now. [↩]

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

Click on thumb to see full

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

I honestly did not expect this movie to be so goddamned entertaining.

I don’t know if the 80s really were a sort of Golden Age of syndicated comics, or if I’m just remembering the highlights better than the lowlights. But there were some genuinely great strips back then, many of whom made the rare decision to exit the field before they got stale and stagnant. We got ‘Calvin and Hobbes’, ‘Bloom County’, ‘This Modern World’, ‘Dykes to Watch Out For’, we got ‘Dilbert’ (hey, they didn’t all get out before going stale and stagnant…)

And we got ‘The Far Side’.

The wonder and beauty of ‘The Far Side’ is that even though it ended almost twenty years ago, in a way it’s still with us today. Because that was what made it so great; Gary Larson wasn’t just a talented writer and a gifted artist, he had a sensibility that changed the way you look at the world. And that change has been passed on ever since, a meme that has continued to spawn and mutate even though the strip is long gone from the funny pages. Gary Larson didn’t just make perfect, hilariously funny single panel comics day in and day out, he made the world seem like a strange and unusual place. Nobody who’s ever seen a ‘Far Side’ strip can quite think of human history the same way after seeing a picture of two cavemen staring at a dead mastodon, a spear impaled in its side, and saying, “Ooh. We should write that spot down.” (And it’s all part of the peculiar alchemy of his words and his art that the people who’ve never read that strip are saying, “What’s so funny about that?” while the people familiar with it are smiling all over again.)

Larson’s work was an inspiration to a generation of comedians, who went on to found single-panel “quirky” gag strips like ‘Close to Home’, ‘Bizarro’, ‘Ballard Street’, ‘The 5th Wave’, ‘Rhymes With Orange’, ‘In the Bleachers’…good strips in their own right, all clearly bearing the unmistakable stamp of their ancestry. They all work in a world where the strange and unusual is commonplace, where people are slightly eccentric in entertaining ways, and where animals behave like (slightly eccentric) people. They write what they know, and what they know is the world Gary Larson showed them. And even better, Larson’s interest in science, combined with his way of writing about it in an entertaining and humorous way (an amoeba husband hectored by his wife: “Stimulus, response, stimulus, response–don’t you ever THINK?”) inspired a generation of young people to take an interest in anthropology, astrophysics, biology, paleontology (the classic cartoon, featuring a bunch of dinosaurs smoking cigarettes with the caption “What Really Killed the Dinosaurs”) and a host of other fields. ‘The Far Side’ was witty, literate, twisted, and indescribably funny. Every day since Gary Larson brought it into the world is a slightly more amusing, slightly more amazing day. Whether it’s pushing on a door marked ‘PULL’ (“School for the Gifted”) or trying to train your dog and imagining it hearing, “blah blah blah GINGER blah blah blah GINGER”, we’re all of us touched a little bit by Larson’s extraordinary perspective on the world.

Now, may I please be excused? My brain is full.

(This is apparently not the only such instance; Mark Waid noted in response to Conway that he did not get a creator credit for Impulse on Young Justice.)

It’s really simple: this is completely indefensible. Completely. It’s all the more shameful when you consider that DC, following their granting of a pension to Siegel and Shuster, was the comics company that trumpeted their creators front-and-center and pioneered the practice of putting creators’ names on the cover. I strongly suspect Man of Steel (which I really want to see) will be the last DC-themed anything I purchase for quite some time, and I already know I’m going to have to counterbalance it with an equal donation to the CBLDF or something just to keep from feeling guilty.

For those of you interested, we now have a “Characters” page for Al’Rashad which has… a lot of information for you! Maybe you will find it interesting. Maybe you will not.

We saw your wang
We saw your wang
In the movie that we saw, we saw your wang

We saw Kevin Bacon’s wang in Wild Things,
and Rich Gere’s in American Gigolo,
and Jason Segel’s wang in Sarah Marshall,
but not erect, cause that’s a big no-no
(unless it’s porn)

We saw Michael Pitt’s wang in The Dreamers,
Gael Bernal’s in Y Tu Mama Tambien,
Peter Saarsgard’s in Kinsey,
Geoff Rush’ in Quills, but see:
We’ll never see Leonardo DiCaprio’s thing
(unless Scorcese asks)

We saw your wang
We saw your wang
In the movie that we saw, we saw your wang

We saw Zach Galifikanis’ in The Hangover,
Tom Hardy’s wang in Bronson took first place;
We saw Robin Williams’ in The Fisher King
And Seth MacFarlane’s whenever we see his face

Billy Crudup’s “Watchmen” wang? Computers;
But Fassbender’s Shame wang was for real,
And Jude Law in The Talented Mr. Ripley,
And Vincent Gallo in The Brown Bunny,
And Ewan McGregor in Trainspotting,
and The Pillow Book, and Velvet Goldmine,
and Young Adam, and Perfect Sense,
and really you have to pay him extra to keep his pants on

We saw your wang
We saw your wang

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.