The Continuing Adventures of Fanboy

No, I'm not talking about The Dark Knight. I'm kicking myself today - I had an allergy attack last night when I went to bed. Runny nose, sneezing. I was up until about 2 my time getting my face to behave again, and mostly bored during it. If I had been thinking about it, I would have hauled my sorry arse to the midnight showing. It would have been ideal - my wife has no interest so far, and our kids are all too young.

I did see Wall-E again last night, though, as it was in the town theater, and we have a housefull of kids to entertain. Just as good on the second run - even my 3 year-old sat all the way through it again without a hiccup.

Entertainment Weekly has fan porn this weekend - Watchmen and Star Trek. It's like getting peeks at Behind the Green Door and um . . the 1997 Vivid remake of Debbie Does Dallas.

Shoving that image aside, *squick*, EW managed to get an interview with Watchmen creator Alan Moore in the same issue; Moore swore off any further contact with filmmakers after they trashed previous adaptions;From Hell, V For Vendetta and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. In the interview, Moore validates all the Insufferable Drama Snobs (and last night's conversation) and gave The Wire Best TV Show Ever Made. If I was Wire creator David Simon, I would have to go out and blow it all on hookers, drugs, and then kill myself afterward, because the rest of my life would NEVER live up to that moment.

Finally, the here's a sample of the Vivid remake Abrams recreation of Trek. Zach Quinto certainly looks like the full monty.

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Emmy Is Nothing But a Preppy Whore

In case you were wondering - yes, there was a girl named Emmy in my high school class.

But it's not that Emmy I'm concerned with. As you heard under the rock, the television Emmy nominees were named today. The Wire, which has a passionate online liberal following, got shafted horribily, picking up only one writing nomination. SciFi's inexplicable piece of nirvanna in their programming sea of shit, Battlestar Galactica, garnered 6 nominations; one nomination in the same Best Drama writing catagory, another for a web Razor featurette, and 4 technical.

We knew the awards are crap, but this is . . anger-making. Which, to be honest, is probably not worth anger or outrage on my part. Fuck them, and their damn awards, and love the torrent.

A few things caught my eye though.

Wikipedia (yeah, I know) notes that SciFi might be to blame for BG's bad reception - "The SciFi Network selected "Six of One" as its' official 2008 Emmy submission for outstanding writing in a drama series. "Six of One" was also chosen as the official entry screening for Katee Sackoff (who plays Kara/Starbuck) as best supporting actress in a dramatic series." Was that the only submission they made for BG? What about Mary McDonnell? Edward James Olmos? Hell, how about Michael Fucking Hogan? If "Six of One" was the only submission made, the SciFi execs are confirmed idiots.

A commenter at AintItCool wrote the following:

The Wire should have swept . . And its absence suggests that at best the Emmy selection committee is old, at worst it's racially bigoted against shows featuring a mainly African American cast. Best Actor, Comedy or Drama: 0 African Americans. Best Actress, Comedy or Drama: 0 African Americans. Best Supporting Actor or Actress, Drama or Comedy: 1 African American. This is racist, it is inexcusable and worst of all it's WRONG. Not wrong as in morally, wrong as in factually. These people were assigned the task of picking the best tv show and they failed, and I'm sure their demographics had nothing to do with it.

It's not the first time that observation has been passed - HBO is no longer the land that Emmys overlook. That excuse has passed. Short of racism, and a thoroughly complex story that takes half a brain to understand, I can't see why the nominations committees overlooked The Wire so consistently.

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By Our Efforts to Honor, We Mock

Driving across campus today, I noticed one fraternity now has a Blue Star Banner hanging in it's front window with 3 stars.

I kinda looked quizzical at that. Because the current DoD regulations I think bar the fraternity from participating in the banner program.

Family members authorized to display the Service Banner include wives, husbands, mothers, fathers, stepparents, parents through adoption, foster parents who stand or stood in loco parentis, sons, daughters, stepchildren, children through adoption, brothers, sisters, half brothers and half sisters of members of the Armed Forces of the United States.

It's a fairly common thing for a frat to bill itself as a family for it's membership - and many young men, some of whom have issues with their own family, often consider the fraternity brothers better siblings and even fathers than they grew up with prior. In many houses, the peer pressure to adopt one's peers as family is tremendous, resembling almost a cult atmosphere. It's no surprise then that a fraternity would want to honor it's sons serving overseas. But fraternities often honor their pledges and even members with unusual displays . .

What surprises me is that the campus ROTC or city recruiters haven't asked for the fraternity to respect the regulations, much less how the house was even able to lay its hands on a fairly difficult-to-obtain decoration.

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The Visitor

Probably one of the best films I've seen in years. Go see it.

The entire cast and director should all be nominated for Oscars.

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Nutshell

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With the Delivery of a Sledgehammer

I wanted the American eagle to go screaming into the East ...Why not spread its wings over the cradle of humanity, I asked myself? ... I said to myself, Here are a people who have suffered for centuries. We can make them as free as ourselves, give them a government and country of their own, put a miniature of the American Constitution afloat in the desert, start a brand new republic to take its place among the free nations of the world. It seemed to me a great task to which we had addressed ourselves. But I have thought some more, since then, and I have read carefully the Iraqi Constitution, and I have seen that we do not intend to free, but to subjugate the people of the Iraq. We have gone there to conquer, not to redeem. It should, it seems to me, be our pleasure and duty to make those people free, and let them deal with their own domestic questions in their own way. And so I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land.

- Mark Twain (paraphrased)

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Obama's Iraq Speech

You can watch it live.

Now.

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How Much For Just The Elvis?

How much Elvis does a candidate (and his running mate) need? Or have we (finally) moved away from Elvis and moved on to John & Paul, Jim Morrison, Bono, or even Springsteen?

Clinton = Elvis. Which is where this stupidity comes from. But Gore? Elvis? and did he have it in 1988, 2000, or even 2008? Ultimately, Gore isn't Elvis. Gore's rockstar is something else, and it may even be dependent on other people's direction (as in movie or TV) and Gore's 40 months in the wilderness following 2000. So is Gore Charlton Heston circa 1970?

That Republicans don't have rockstar is a given. Ronnie Raygun had a movie star thing on with certain conservatives, but that was more about genially willing to kick the crap out of anything threatening to U.S. ego and interests, both domstically and foreign. Oddly, Huckabee has some rockstar, but it's more in common with a preacher (no surprise) - which I think is why he gives hives to rest of the parties in and just outsie the Republican tent.

Obama is no Elvis either; Obama has something else . . I call his rockstar Neil Young, because no matter how good the music is, there's parts of his philosophy that are still offensive to me, and inevitably Young does something to piss me off as though it's personally degrading to him that the a DFH blogger like me could support his ass.

Does the VP candidate need rockstar? Does he or she need some Ringo & George, John Densmore, The Edge, or Steven Van Zant or Patti Scialfa?

Which comes back around to Obama as Neil Young, saying or doing something that pisses me off. On that list of FISA enablers, Webb, Nelson and Bayh all stand out. I would consider it unlikely that if any of the Senators are being considered that they'd knowingly diverge from Obama's position. But no rockstars.

In the current crop of VP's-in-waiting, only Edwards has a rockstar that is clearly evident. But Edwards has little or no chance for the second line of the ticket. Bill Richardson has an anti-rockstar - he's like a genial stand-up comedian with a schlub persona who's learned that he's not very funny telling jokes. Sen. Clinton has no Elvis - but is she like Madonna or Melissa Etheridge? Or does she just have no rockstar?

Of course, I'd pay real money for anyone who's got no celebrity and is a sure improvement to the Slim Pickens currently in office.

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