Okay, my apologies to anyone who’s a) not seriously into Doctor Who, and b) not absolutely mega-geeky. But this is an idea I’ve had for a long time now, and I wanted to get it out on metaphorical paper. So for those of you not into hardcore fan theorizing…sorry, but shit just got real.

continue reading "Uber-Time: A Theory of Time Travel In Doctor Who"

So I just received a comment on the Star Trek: DS9 alignments post as follows:

congrats!

You grabbed the number one google ranking for “DS9 character alignment” and Star Trek character alignment” from me.

This was followed, of course, by a link to said person’s webpage, which was presumably their page which previously had the number one Google ranking for those things. (Link has since been edited so it is no longer an active hyperlink.) Curious about their SEO desperation, I followed the link…

…and found my own damn alignment chart there.

This is why I watermark all my stuff now, even if I don’t always like the aesthetic thereof.

When Crisis on Infinite Earths happened, one of its effects was that the Golden Age versions of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman were no longer available for membership in the All-Star Squadron, which was at the time still an important and going concern as a comics property. DC’s solution was to relaunch All-Star Squadron as The Young All-Stars, creating a subteam of youth characters within the All-Star Squadron which would feature their new replacements for the Golden Age trinity: Fury for Wonder Woman, Flying Fox for Batman and “Iron” Munro for Superman.

This didn’t work all that well. In retrospect, there was the problem that if these three characters were intended to replace Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, putting them on an 1940s version of the Teen Titans probably wasn’t the way to go about doing that. After all, several definitive All-Star Squadron stories – most importantly “The Ultra War,” which is probably the greatest of all Squadron stories and the one where the Golden Age Superman’s feud with the Ultra-Humanite is absolutely central to the plot – rely on the presence of the big three, so having a “new trinity” that doesn’t address the continuity problemss of removing the “old trinity” became a headache, not least because Roy Thomas was writing this and whenever Roy Thomas couldn’t address a continuity problem in a comic he was writing, he got cranky.

But it also didn’t work because the replacement characters were problematic. Flying Fox was not bad at all. Fury was kind of a mess. “Iron” Munro, meanwhile, fell in somewhere between the two. The character has a simple and appealing visual design to him – the superhero costume as stripped down to tight shirt and pair of pants, twenty years before anybody thought that Superboy should wear jeans, and in some ways a callback to Doc Savage. (e.g. this cover.) It’s pulpy, in the ways that pulp is good.

But he never really integrated within the fabric of the DCU WW2 setting in a way that felt organic, much in the way that the All-Star Squadron never really did post-Crisis. (Really, the franchise was dealt a serious blow by Crisis, forced to re-imagine itself somewhat, and never recovered from it. You will note that up until the nu52, references to the Golden Age since Crisis are almost always about the Justice Society rather than the Squadron, to the point that the Johnny Quicks and Robotmen of the world are often referred to as Society members.) This wasn’t for lack of trying: “Iron” Munro was revealed to be Damage’s father, was referenced by Superman as being Clark’s idol when he was a kid – but it always came across as minor elements of DC saying “hey, you should really care about this guy!” rather than making people really care about him.

Which is a bit of a shame, because I still think the character has a visual flair to him that could really work. But he doesn’t. Not yet.

Before I start, a quick plug: I am currently accepting sign-ups for BASH WARS SIX, a tournament I run in which people on LiveJournal choose fictional ass-kickers to fight to the death.  You may recall that last year my sovereign implored you to offer your support for unofficial MGK.com mascot Rex the Wonder Dog, which led to Rex’s BATTLE~! with unofficial MGK.com heartthrob Doctor Who.   I’m sure you just read that sentence and said “That’s stupid!  Jack Burton could kick both of their asses!”  Well, don’t sing it, bring it.

Moving on…today I went to the comics shop to buy Fear Itself: Captain America #7.1, which is trying my patience just from the issue number alone.  I was totally going to skip this because I was extrmely eager to put Fear Itself behind me (short review: “Meh”) and DC taught me a long time ago that these Giant Crossover Aftermath miniseries are completely skippable.  What changed, then, is that this morning I saw a major spoiler for the comic, revealing information that actually made me want to read it.  Without giving anything away, Marvel had recently solicited Untitled Brubaker Project #1, and basically Fear Itself #7.1 serves as a prologue to said project and reveals said title.

This got me to thinking.  Full spoilers behind the cut…

continue reading "Untitled Smith Project #1"

The Sanctum Sanctorum has, of late, become just another clubhouse for capes on Earth-616. The Defenders and Avengers hang out there every so often when they want to be somewhere a little less public than average. The Thing runs one of his three ongoing poker games there. The X-Men and Avengers run fieldtrips there for their students so Dr. Strange can teach them how to fight magical foes. (He doesn’t mind doing it, although he always takes care to make sure to inform each young hero’s subconsciousness that, although not falling apart in fear is an excellent thing to do with magical foes, that in reality they know next to nothing and therefore their confidence should not be unreasonable. This is about as much as he can realistically do. He has tried to make this work on Spider-Man approximately seven hundred times and it never takes.)

Now, the Sanctum Sanctorum is the headquarters of the Sorcerer Supreme. It is a fantastically important place. Doctor Strange allowing visitors to it is kind of like Nick Fury opening the doors of one of his forty-three hidden secret bases for an open house and bake sale: it’s honestly kind of a terrible idea, not least because someone – probably Hawkeye – will poke at something they shouldn’t poke at, and the next thing you know demons are invading Cleveland.

But, at the same time, the Sanctum Sanctorum is kind of expected as part of the whole “Stephen Strange experience” now. There’s nothing for it: the Defenders all talked to their friends about the place (and since one of them was Hank McCoy that meant a lot of talking) and now it has a reputation. People expect the Sanctum Sanctorum to be mystical and spooky and weird, but also welcoming and safe. It’s a precarious balance to strike, and honestly, maintaining it is a hassle.

Which is why there are actually two Sanctum Sanctorums. Not in the Nick Fury way where there are multiple secret bases, and not anything to do with parallel universes. (Reed Richards, one of the very few who knows Stephen’s little trick in this matter, always gets a little bit irritated when he proposes a new way to explain how the whole thing works, and Doc’s response is inevitably to shrug and say “not really, but if you like.”) The Sanctum Sanctorums are both at 177A Bleecker Street; they’re the same building and they occupy the same space. If you know how, transitioning from one to the other is really quite simple.

The two Sancta are distinct. One – call it Sanc – is what you would expect the Sanctum Sanctorum to be. There are dribbled candles, extremely moody and dramatic lighting, and shadows cloak everything (even at noon). There are dusty bookshelves with musty old tomes and the occasional skull. The other – call it Tum – is what the Sanctum Sanctorum actually needs to be in order for Doctor Strange to function on a daily basis. It’s clean, with comfortable couches and good lighting so he can actually read all of his books. (The bookshelves are all from IKEA. He got them on sale.) There is of course still the occasional skull, but all of the eldritch paraphernalia is neatly stored away for easy access. It is embarrassingly practical.

Of course, since this is magic, the two Sancta have each developed their own distinct personalities – not exactly sentient, of course, but certainly there’s something there that is more than nothing. Both are completely sane and willing servants to the Doctor: Sanc is concerned with performance and Tum with comfort. Sanc allows windows to open so that candles flicker at precisely the right moment and howling wind whistles as necessary. Tum makes sure the thermostat is always set at the optimum level and somehow manages to dust itself. They are invaluable assistants. They’re a little bit at odds and tend to squabble in ways non-bodied personality complexes can (Sanc leaves a petrified demon raccoon out when someone transitions to Tum, Tum leaves a Swiffer out when transitioning to Sanc), but those are just personality quirks.

Until, of course, something happens, and suddenly these two personalities aren’t quite as disembodied as they used to be…

So once again it has come time for my yearly “spend the money to continue having hosting.” And honestly – I’m hoping that by this time next year I won’t have to hold out the hat for your spare change but instead be so flush that the money will just be a little bit of nothing, much in the way that other people purchase a pair of skis. But, right now, in the midst of paying down my not-insignificant student loans and having to lay out cash for malpractice insurance and Law Society dues, I am relatively cash-poor.

So I request of my readership: please do click that “donate” button. It makes my life a little bit easier, and you continue to get what I would humbly submit is entertaining content with exactly zero ads, and I can keep clicking “report as spam” on all those emails from “freelancers” asking to submit posts that would, just coincidentally, have links in them to sites where you can purchase things! (Or are possibly malware sites. I’m not sure which; I never check. I just report the emails as spam.) Because I like that this site never asks you to spend money. Except when I ask you to spend money, and I do so as rarely as possible.

So I’m at my friend’s place and her daughter is showing off her candy haul to me excitedly and explaining how much she got of each type of candy (including an ungodly number of Coffee Crisps, but if you’re going to get a lot of one type of fun-sized bar, you might as well get a good one) and when she gets to the lollipops I recoil in shock, because now they are making “fun-size” Tootsie Roll Pops.

I mean, seriously? Fun-sized lollipops? These things looked like little candy pellets on tiny sticks. These would not even take one lick to get to the centre. It would have been cute if it wasn’t so clearly a total destruction of my youth, which was far more awesome than any present childhood because the damn Tootsie Roll Pops were at least the right size.

Apropos of nothing, here is a Halloweeny video for everybody: the Pet Shop Boys with “Heart,” which has a Dracula in it. And get this: the Dracula is actually Ian McKellen, which I only learned very recently, and which explains why this Dracula is such a swinging dancer.

So on the Twitters, people are reacting to news of Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries’ divorce rather predictably: e.g. they are following the example of George Takei and snarking about how brief marriages such as these demean the institution of marriage way more than letting gay people marry does. (Memo to George Takei: Whenever Perez Hilton is on your side, you should strongly consider the possibility that you are wrong.)

Now, I’m not going to pretend that I am a Kardashian fan – I am not. I don’t particularly care about her marriage either. In fact I’m feeling distinctly unpleasant at the prospect of writing a bunch of words defending her, as I am about to do. Hell, I have made fun of the Kardashians on numerous occasions. But I think a few points need to be made here.

1.) It is not Kim Kardashian’s fault that you are not rich and famous. Let’s be honest: a lot of the Kardashian animus is fueled by dislike and jealousy of the fact that Kim Kardashian and her family are famous in the Paris Hilton way of not actually doing anything but still being talked about. Granted, it would be a finer world if only people who actually did things of merit became famous, but “merit” is an awfully subjective thing. I mean, there are people out there who think Taylor Lautner can act or that Ben Roethlisburger doesn’t sexually assault women, for example. Is Kim Kardashian’s fame less earned because she got it by knowing the right people and getting to be on reality shows?

After all, it is quite clear that the Kardashians have worked their ass off to establish themselves as brands; fame such as this does not happen by accident, much as some might wish it did. It is valid to believe that society should not be this way and that the Kardashians’ fame is improper (and I am with you there!); however, it is not valid to suggest that the Kardashians’ fame is undeserved. Which leads me to point two:

2.) Snarking at someone’s personal misery is a bit low, regardless of whether or not they may be rich. People who are not rich have a tendency to assume that being rich means that any personal humiliation is somehow lessened, and this is not an unfair instinct, but it’s still wrong. Yes, Kim Kardashian had a public relationship and a wedding that she turned into a TV special, and made a lot of money doing so, and there is much about it – particularly the wedding – which can be considered to be in very bad taste. But conversely: this is someone who went on TV to have their wedding in front of the entire world and is now being more or less publicly humiliated as a result.

Unless you believe the entire wedding was a fiction – and I personally don’t, because there are simply easier and less embarrassing ways to make a buck when you are a Kardashian – then you should accept the proposition that just possibly Kim Kardashian is mortified right now, and publicly so. And I say this, understand, as someone who mocked the TV wedding to hell and back, because the wedding is fair game – they’re happy during the awful thing, so they can take it.

Now, I understand the joys of schadenfreude in this situation, but this time around it might be worth considering holding back. And why do I say that?

3.) Kim Kardashian supports gay marriage. Yep, she does, and she does so unreservedly. Now, if this were another celebutante opining about some horrible social opinion, then I would probably throw my first two points out the window and pile on anyway. But Kim Kardashian has been pro-gay-marriage for a long time, and judging by Keeping Up With The Kardashians‘ demographics numbers, her fame is driven by many people who are not inclined to be pro-gay-marriage, so her public and enthusiastic support of gay marriage did not come without risk to her (admittedly awful) livelihood.

Is it possible, then, that those proponents of gay marriage looking for their hypocrite-of-the-week could look elsewhere? Because, and I am not going to say this terribly often, this time Kim Kardashian deserves better treatment.

My weekly TV column is up at Torontoist.

(And how come Curtis Armstrong isn’t more in demand as a character actor, anyway?)

On thinking about it, I think that part of the fun I have with fandom is coming up with crazy theories.

I don’t mean just crazy speculation. I know some people get a charge out of watching the first two episodes of Season Six and thinking,  “Hmm, I wonder if River Song is going to secretly be a future incarnation of Captain Jack…” But in general, I try not to do that because I become interested enough in my own ideas to prefer them over what the writer inevitably comes up with. (The Doctor should have escaped from the Pandorica through a time crack that opened up on the inside, dammit!)

What I’m mainly talking about id deliberately subverting textual evidence; I have fun trying to come up with the most contrarian interpretation that the text will support. I think it’s important not to take it too seriously…some of the least pleasant conversations I’ve had as a fan are with people who will insist that the Hinchcliffe Doctor was real and will not let it go. But if you’re willing to enter it in a playful spirit, and if the other person is willing to play along (some of the other least pleasant conversations I’ve ever had are with people who get really pissed off by suggestions that Boba Fett was anything other than a total badass and will cite obscure passages from the Star Wars Cookbook to support their contentions…) it can be a lot of fun.

I’m sure people who regularly read this blog, and who can distinguish me from MGK, will know about some of the crazy theories I’ve talked about (the aliens in ‘Aliens’ are sentient and just don’t have a whole lot of empathy for human beings, the Jedi are ruthless sociopaths who hold the Republic in a subtle-yet-inescapable grip and Luke “wins” by rejecting both philosophies.) But I’d like to hear some of yours. So, in the playful spirit of subversively silly fan theories, go ahead and propose your own in the comments!

(OK, one more of mine: At some point in the far future of the Daleks’ own timeline, they are reduced to a single settlement that is left to survive as nothing more than a “nature park”, a sop to the various races that didn’t want to commit genocide even against the mortal foes of every other life form in the universe. This settlement contains the last, degenerate, pathetic remnants of the Dalek race, guarded by Thals for so long that both sides forget that a larger universe even exists. And it’s this last Dalek city, this final tattered refuge of the once-terrifying Dalek species, that William Hartnell’s Doctor visits in the very first Dalek story. The Doctor’s first encounter with the Daleks is actually the last story from their point of view.)

Wolverine and the X-Men #1 is a good comic. It is in many ways close to the verge of being a great comic. But it isn’t great.

What works about the comic? The school as fantastical setting: the Jean Grey School For Higher Learning (a nice touch on the name, incidentally) is very plainly the Marvel Universe’ equivalent of Hogwarts in a way that the X-Men’s various schools have never really been: Jason Aaron really plays up the crazy nature of the place as he takes the Obsequious Norms (not their real name, but it might as well be) on a Logan-and-Kitty-guided-tour of the school grounds, and it is purely entertaining and light in a way that the X-books rarely are. In terms of voice, Aaron nails all of the X-characters (not unexpected). His new tweaks (like Kid Gladiator) are largely welcome.

What doesn’t work? Well, the Obsequious Norms, who are of course the human fuddy-duddies who are sort of bigoted towards mutants and all scowly and you know that after one or two issues of being frightened out of their wits that they’re just gonna come around or there will be some sort of plot twist. It’s like, after coming up with this fantastic setting, Aaron decided to go with something as conventional as was possible. Seriously, this was like something out of a bad sitcom. (“Starring Tim Allen as Wolverine!”)

What kind of works? Chris Bachalo’s art. Bachalo sells the fantastic setting and the fantastic characters, and his draftsmanship just keeps getting better (I swear I see more and more George Herriman in his pencils with each passing year). But he’s not good in this book at going small, at selling the small, conversational moments in the comic. (And he has done this well before, so it’s not something Bachalo can’t do.) Kitty Pryde – who spends the issue trying to convince the Obseqious Norms that really this is not a nuthouse on par with The Muppet Show – doesn’t look right at any point during the issue. Oya’s scene – which should be at least a little devastating, from the dialogue – comes across as purely comedic instead of dramedic because Oya spends the entire page with a Stepford grin on her face. And the final confrontation between Kade Kilgore and Wolverine loses much of its dramatic impact because Kilgore spends all of it striking silly, overdramatic facial expressions instead of just standing there and being a cool bastard like he’s been shown to be previously.

Don’t get me wrong: the good vastly outweighs the bad here, and the bad is mostly a matter of personal taste more than anything else. But it’s enough that I can’t say outright that it’s a great book. It’s good, and for now that’s enough.

NOTE: This was the third of these, written back for my Livejournal back when I was still on Livejournal. However, it does not appear to have been web-archived, and besides, I might as well rewrite it now. So this is a revamped version of the original article.

Have you ever jacked in? Have you ever wire tripped? No? A virgin brain. Well, we’re gonna start you off right. This isn’t like “TV, only better.” this is life. Yeah, this is a piece of somebody’s life. Pure and uncut, straight from the cerebral cortex. You’re there! You’re doing it, seeing it, hearing it! You’re feeling it! It’s about the stuff you can’t have, right? Like running into a liquor store with a .357 magnum in your hand, feeling the adrenaline pumping through your veins.

Strange Days foresaw a lot about the future when it first came out.

Not the “jacking in” thing, where people get addicted to reliving copies of brainscanned memories on laserdisc – although in 1993, people didn’t really have an idea of what net.addiction was just yet, and in some ways Strange Days‘s conceit of becoming addicted to living somebody else’s life presages, in many ways, World of Warcraft, Second Life and similar online pursuits, and heck let’s just toss Youtube on there as well while we’re at it because you know there are people using it to relive old memories they probably shouldn’t. So hell, let’s count that as a prediction for Strange Days. But let’s also count its prediction of the rise of a Tupac Shakur-like rapper with similar cult following after his violent death, its depiction of a society with the killer mix of ever-growing social stratification combined with ideological and cultural divisions in the underclass, its recognition that the growing fusion of hip-hop, pop and metal would only continue, and its understanding that Tom Sizemore looks really freaky and awesome in a wig. Okay, that last one isn’t really a prediction, but come on. He looks freaky and awesome in a wig.

You know how I know it’s the end of the world? -Everything already been done, every kind of music’s been tried, every kind of government’s been tried, every fucking hairstyle, bubble gum flavors, you know, breakfast cereal… What are we going to do? How are we going to make another thousand years? I’m telling you, man, it’s over. We used it all up.

But Strange Days is great for reasons other than its often impressive precognitive abilities. It’s got Angela Bassett in what I would argue is her definitive movie role and one of the baddest-ass female action hero roles ever, which by itself makes the entire catalogue of Angelina Jolie look wussy. It teaches us the secret of making Juliette Lewis tolerable, which is to have her sing rather than speak (seriously: the movie’s major flaw is that Lewis’ appeal to Ralph Fiennes is only evident when she’s singing). It has a killer supporting cast: Sizemore, Michael Wincott, Vincent D’onofrio, William Fichtner, Glenn Plummer. It has an absolutely fantastic soundtrack that sounded in 1993 like what the future of music would sound like, and to an extent still does. It has one of the most beautiful and heartfelt endings I’ve ever seen in a movie, and begins with what I still hold up to be one of the greatest cold opens in film history (which, lest we forget, was filmed long before lightweight digital cameras were available, and thus had to be filmed entirely on full-sized Steadicams):

You’re just calmly backstroking along in the big toilet bowl and somehow you never let it touch you. I mean, between working vice and your current so-called occupation, you must have seen every kind of perversion. But you’re just like… some teflon man, you still come out this goofball romantic.

And it has Ralph Fiennes as Lenny Nero, the protagonist, and this is great because Ralph Fiennes rarely gets to be the hero of a story that isn’t staggeringly tragic – seriously, almost all of his major roles have been either villains (Voldemort, Amon Goth, Hades, Harry Waters in In Bruges) or heroes who have to suffer unimaginably (see The English Patient, Sunshine, The Constant Gardner, The End of the Affair – one could go on). Lenny, on the other hand, is a straight-up hero. Maybe a flawed one (after all, he is an ex-cop who’s also the future-equivalent of a drug dealer who is obviously obsessed with his ex-girlfriend), and certainly not your traditional action lead (Lenny openly admits he’s a talker rather than a fighter – he oozes good-natured smarm in a way that just makes you root for him), but he’s the hero here, and it’s just so great to see Fiennes for once straight-up play the good guy and do it so well. (Of course, shortly after Strange Days Fiennes unfortunately signed on to play John Steed in The Avengers, and although he was the best thing about that movie, it basically killed him as a heroic lead. So in Strange Days we are essentially seeing Fiennes in a position he would never be in again.)

This tie cost more than your entire wardrobe. It’s the one thing that stands between me and the jungle.

I am shying away from discussing the plot, and this is not because the various plot twists (and yes, of course there are plot twists) are so crucial to enjoying the film that being spoiled of them would ruin the film. (At least one of them most viewers, I expect, will see coming their first time out.) I’m refraining from discussing it because, although the plot is perfectly good, Strange Days relies on character and performance to see it through to the end, and does so with skill and grace. Kathryn Bigelow was decades away from her long-deserved Oscar at this point, but she’s always been a muscular presence behind the camera and this film is no exception: there’s nothing wasted in this, not for a second, and the direction never bores nor grows incoherent. She’s too good to let that happen.

One man’s mundane and desperate existence is another man’s Technicolor.

Strange Days is a wonderful mix of pessimism and optimism, of action and drama and mystery and sci-fi (and some truly funny bits, although it is by no means a comedy). It is also an extended analogy about the Rodney King riots and the sometimes tenuous bond between police and society as a whole. And while it does very few things perfectly, it does many things very well.

And did I mention that soundtrack?

MGK: So it turns out that the people who are putting out Anonymous are also encouraging teachers to run lessons about how Shakespeare did not, in fact, write Shakespeare.
FLAPJACKS: I have no idea what that sentence is about.
MGK: Okay. So, you know Roland Emmerich?
FLAPJACKS: Yes.
MGK: He has directed a movie called Anonymous, which theorizes that the works of William Shakespeare were in fact written by the Earl of Oxford.
FLAPJACKS: …and?
MGK: What do you mean, “and”?
FLAPJACKS: And what blows up?
MGK: Nothing blows up.
FLAPJACKS: That doesn’t sound right. Are you sure the Globe Theatre doesn’t blow up?
MGK: I’m pretty sure, yes.
FLAPJACKS: Oh. So Shakespeare is an alien, then.
MGK: No.
FLAPJACKS: Look, you said this was a Roland Emmerich film, so either something blows up or there is aliens. There are rules about this.
MGK: Nothing blows up and there are no aliens.
FLAPJACKS: The Earl of Oxford is an alien, maybe.
MGK: There are no aliens.
FLAPJACKS: Queen Elizabeth?
MGK: No aliens.
FLAPJACKS: Maybe the Tower of London is a spaceship.
MGK: No aliens.
FLAPJACKS: Well, if there’s no aliens and no explosions, why did Emmerich even make this movie?
MGK: Well, he says “I like big ideas. That’s probably what combines Anonymous with my other films. You know, “What if Shakespeare was a fraud?” Or, “What would happen if finally, in one big storm, we get the bill for all the bad things we’ve done to the environment?” Or, “Godzilla comes to New York.” All big ideas, in a way, and you can say them in one sentence.”
FLAPJACKS: How is “Godzilla comes to New York” a big idea? Godzilla goes to cities and smashes them up. It’s basically the whole point of Godzilla. Godzilla movies are not about him having a nice dinner at a restaurant with Mothra and discussing their midlife crises.
MGK: I think, given the other examples in the sentence, you have to understand that a big idea for Roland Emmerich is not quite what we would call “a big idea” for other people.
FLAPJACKS: “Hey, guys, I just had this big idea! What if an asteroid hit the Earth? No, wait, I got a hundred of these! What if the Titanic sank? I can’t believe nobody’s thought of this yet!”
MGK: Yes. This is the sort of finely tuned mind that decides that a conspiracy about William Shakespeare is a big idea.
FLAPJACKS: Still, is it not worth considering whether Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare?
MGK: No.
FLAPJACKS: Well, maybe we should look at the pros and cons. For a start: his name is William Shakespeare. That seems like a “pro” to me right there.
MGK: That is indeed an excellent point.
FLAPJACKS: But perhaps we should consider the fact that he was, after all, only some lowly schlub and not an educated nobleman of class and leisure. I mean, how could a mere actor know of the existence of far-off countries like Italy and Denmark? It’s not like they had Wikipedia back then.
MGK: I believe they did, however, have books. Also, on occasion, they had foreigners.
FLAPJACKS: Mere trifles. Also, he wrote about aristocrats a lot, so therefore one could credibly argue that William Shakespeare’s plays were therefore written by a noble, because who knows more about nobles than other nobles?
MGK: The problem with this argument is that it therefore logically follows that Snooki from Jersey Shore wrote her own book, rather than having it ghostwritten.
FLAPJACKS: An excellent counter-argument, particularly given Snooki’s emergent status as “next Shakespeare.” Or, should we say, next Earl of Oxford.
MGK: I think I just threw up in my mouth a little bit.
FLAPJACKS: Me as well! But that’s not important: what’s important is the undeniable fact that Shakespeare was just a common-as-dirt plebe, and that five hundred years after his death, we can no longer find his original manuscripts proving that he was the writer, so therefore clearly it was a nobleman.
MGK: Yes, you have summed up the “Shakespeare didn’t write Shakespeare” argument quite neatly. By which, of course, I mean you have demonstrated that it’s really just a bunch of classist garbage spun forth by people who don’t want to admit, for whatever reason, that the greatest writer in the English language was basically just some nobody.
FLAPJACKS: Well, we do have to have standards. I mean, we can’t all be Snooki.
MGK: Throwing up in my mouth again.
FLAPJACKS: Yeah, me too.