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Wacky Neighbor, making cool terror alert counters and reading about XML so you don't have to.

Spongiform Sexuality

Hey, guess who the right wing Christians outed today?

On the heels of electoral victories barring same-sex marriage, some influential conservative Christian groups are turning their attention to a new target: the cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants.

"Does anybody here know SpongeBob?" Dr. James C. Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, asked the guests Tuesday night at a black-tie dinner for members of Congress and political allies to celebrate the election results [...]

Now, Dr. Dobson said, SpongeBob's creators had enlisted him in a "pro-homosexual video," in which he appeared alongside children's television colleagues like Barney and Jimmy Neutron, among many others. The makers of the video, he said, planned to mail it to thousands of elementary schools to promote a "tolerance pledge" that includes tolerance for differences of "sexual identity." [...]

"We see the video as an insidious means by which the organization is manipulating and potentially brainwashing kids," he said. "It is a classic bait and switch."

You know what I say? Thank God. I've been secretly turned on by SpongeBob cartoons for months, going to the SpongeBob slashfic rooms ("What are you staring at, Mulder? I'm just taking a shower ... with this sexy, sexy sponge..."), doing the photomanips of SpongeBob and me at the prom -- I thought it meant I had a serious, serious perversion problem. Now it turns out I'm just gay. Whew.

Sophie Mae's Choice

Our new friend Curtin in the comments reminds us that the movie with Roscoe P. Coltrane as the hero sherriff fighting the malevolent local yokels has already been made -- it was Walking Tall.

Which brings us to an interesting thought experiment. If Buford Pusser moved to Hazard, and tried to bring order to a county where the Duke Boys were "... making their way, the only way they know how/That's just a little bit more than the law would allow", who would the rednecks root for?

TGC #36679 - In which Bo and Luke kick a New York Jewish elections worker to death ...

Tyrone: ... no, I'm not going to the new Dukes of Hazard movie. I hated the show as a kid.
John: What, just because their car had a huge symbol of southern oppression on the roof?
Tyrone: Yeah, something like that. Also the sneaking suspicion, that if the show were really about what life was like in the South in the '80's, you KNOW Uncle Jessie had some of the lynching postcards in that shack of his.
John: "... just some good ol' boys ... never meaning no harm ... burning down black chuuuurches ..." -- and we never saw how they got their money to keep that car so cherry either.
Tyrone: That's why Daisy was always in those tiny, uncomfortable cut-offs. They were pimping her out at the local Greyhound bus stop.
John: "Stop crying Daisy, you know we're short on our payment to Boss Hogg this week."
Tyrone: If the Narrator were honest, just once: "Hoo-wee, looks like them Duke boys done blown up their crystal meth lab and are in a heap o'trouble..."
John: Wouldn't that be great? If Roscoe P. Coltrane was really the hero, just trying to protect Hazard County from those two white-trash meth-head psycopaths who kept blowing shit up with their dynamite arrows?
Tyrone: If that were the movie, I'd go see THAT.

Wow, so that's the twist end to THE OTHERS?

A Polish woman who pretended to be a ghost and “haunted” an Alpine castle was sentenced to four months in prison by an Italian court.

Police were called in to investigate mysterious creaking doors and other unexplained nocturnal noises heard in 15th century Castel Coldrano, near the Swiss and Austrian borders, by a female occupant who ran the castle’s cultural centre.

Video cameras placed by investigators revealed the noises to be man – or woman – made, and arrested the 42-year-old Pole, whose husband worked for the centre.

Police said she was motivated by “a personal rancour” against the manager, and charged her with harrassment and incidental damage to the castle.

Thanks to Warren Ellis.

Samurai Champloo

Just watched the first disc. It's Cowboy BeBop. With swords.

What the hell are you waiting for?

R.O.M.-com

Yes, it's "Obscure Post Title Weekend" here at the Kung Fu Monkey. For the edification of puzzled e-mailers, in ascending order I was referring to feminist Andrea Dworkin; the original, infinitely better tagline for The Core; and this one is a pun on the industry short-hand for "romantic comedy". Yeah, it's like Name of the Rose all up in here...

What motivated this post? Well, I always kinda dug the Marvel character Rom, the Space Knight. So when Devin from CHUD posted a link to a Rom website, I went over and --

AAAAHHHHH! AAAHHHHHH! AAAGGHHGHGHGAAAHHHHHH!

Eternity has residuals

Nice coincidence. The same week The Core shows up on cable, I find out "unobtanium" is in the Wikipedia entry on fictional chemical substances. It includes the word's derivation and specific historical reference, (which is why I used it in the first place). Neat.

I still mourn the poor treatment of that movie. Second week of the war, same week as THREE other movies (thank YOU, Paramount), and in a greater sense, suffering by association with the other shitty, bad science sci-fi movies Hollywood chokes out. But I'll stack it up against the acting and story in any other sci-fi movie, period. Eckhardt freaking out and Hilary Swank BANGING her head against the chair when she has to let someone die and Tucci -- the frikkin TUCC, people -- saying goodbye to Delroy Lindo ... there's some old-school science-hero acting chops going on in there. There are moments in other disaster sci-fi movies where main characters die, and you still don't even know their frikkin' NAMES an hour into the flick. I will be eternally in debt to Jon Amiel and that cast for making that movie what it is.

Taking the writing off-ramp, it is I will admit a character weakness of mine that I still steam when I see some reviewer chuckle over the scientific inaccuracies in the movie, and then support their argument with examples of things which are fantastical, but in fact true. I have made some rather, ah, dubious choices when caught in that fever. If you know what I mean.

Although I'm as big a fan of hard sci-fi as anyone -- Lucifer's Hammer is literally what made me get my degree in physics -- I can't help but wonder about the, well, sourness of tone it's brought to the sci-fi community. Somehow, being able to show your work in excruciating detail is no longer something which sets you apart as a cool book (or movie), or just some facet of your writing style, but now seems to be the minimum entrance requirement to avoid scorn.

Is it some insecurity on our part as science fiction fans that being able to point to the real science somehow justifies our interest as more intellectual than fantasy-based? And therefore somehow more "legitimate"? This defense mechanism isn't entirely unjustified, by the way, thanks to the ghettoization of genres, brought about by a great degree by insecure critics. Nice vicious circle ...

Isn't the science in science fiction supposed to be the jumping off point? Are we losing a whole new generation of dreamers? When I read sci fi as a kid, I didn't want to read about what was possible. I read about THE IMPOSSIBLE, and then dreamed about how to get there. Knowing there may be real-world tools to achieve that impossible is keen, but not inspiring. And to me, regardless of genre, what a good story does is inspire.

There are authors who handle integrating real-world tech into their stories as jumping off points masterfully -- Warren Ellis, of course, Neal Stephenson and Bruce Sterling come to mind. But I'm afraid that so much of the techo-speak in genre books comes across as masturbation, and in my opinion, somehow undercuts what we're supposed to be doing as storytellers. Again, my opinion, and feel free to tell me I'm insane. This isn't even limited to sci-fi. The spy thriller is infected with the same buzz-kill fun-hunting virus.

I adore Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, with its endless discussions of terraforming and tensile strength of space elevator cables. But is it really better sci-fi than Asimov's Foundation trilogy, with its atomic priests? Is a Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six, which dedicated an ENTIRE CHAPTER to field-stripping an MP-5, really a better spy novel than Goldfinger?

You know what? Fuck the math. I want my warp drive and laser watch.