I loved South Park. There were times, watching the show or the movie, where I couldn't stop laughing. The comedy was great and irreverent. I'd gasp out my surprise, saying, in between breaths, "Oh, that's not right!" 

Then, something started to change. I don't know when it happened, but I know when I noticed it. I was watching the episode where Mr. Garrison gets a sex change operation, and graphic depictions of the surgery are shown. Then Mr. Garrison (now Ms. Garrison) decides to begin "scissoring" everyone he meets--rubbing his new vagina against everyone.

While I still found myself saying "that's not right," I was doing it without the laughter. South Park broke the one cardinal rule that no comedy show may break. It wasn't funny.

In place of the comedy, we had moralizing and a series of story elements that were increasingly offensive. Cartman indirectly murders two people, captures their bodies and chops them up as meat to be fed to their child. Chef gets mauled by a bear--his face is ripped off and (post-mortem) shits all over himself. 

These just weren't funny. They were tasteless and offensive. And, as time wore on, the comedic elements seemed to be replaced more and more with these shock moments. I stopped watching. In fact, I was surprised, in researching this post, that the show is still on the air.

The other day, I was watching Family Guy, which has been a favorite of mine for years. It's been compared to South Park often, because it's another animated TV show that tends to push the envelope.

Then I watched the Stephen King episode.

It aired this season. There were several points where I questioned their choices, but what made me stop short was when they parodied "Stand By Me." There's a scene in the movie at the end where the boyhood friends walk away from the central character, and Richard Dreyfus (the narrator) talks about what happened to each of them.

In Family Guy, when it came to Quagmire, representing the character played by River Phoenix in the movie, the narration said, "Quag grew up to become a famous Hollywood actor. Unfortunately, about a week ago, he took an overdose of designer drugs at the Viper Room. He died, on the curb outside. And now we are left with a hare-lipped reminder of what might have been."

At that point, Joaquin Phoenix's photo slides into view on the screen. A trumpet sounds with a vaudevillian, "waw waaawwwww."

When they return from the commercial break, Peter Griffin appears, and says, "Joaquin Phoenix, if you are still watching, you're a good sport, and a trooper. And you passed our test. And you can be our friend."

It's been quite a few years since Jon Hein coined the phrase, "Jumping the Shark" to refer to a point in a television show's lifetime where it stretches its own premise past the breaking point in a desperate attempt to grab ratings.

Today, the threshold seems to be the level of taste the writers/producers of these shows are willing to ignore in a desperate attempt to grab news stories or viewers. Shows like Family Guy and South Park are particularly vulnerable to this. They've always delicately walked the line between good comedy and bad taste, but, as time goes by and writers change, it seems that the trend is to move from one side of the line to the other.

For my part, I just have to shake my head. Once that threshold has been crossed, I don't think it's worth it. Why should I have to sit through a television show that regularly shows insulting and offensive statements just for the one line that's vaguely humorous? Personally, I think THAT is not right.

I have an interesting anecdotal observation that, if I had the time and the access, I would love to check.

Take statistics around missing children in a given geographical area (city, state, region), break it down by demographic, and then compare it to Amber Alerts for the same area.

One day, I noticed that the large majority of the Amber Alerts I saw were little, blonde children. I then realized that several missing children reports that were in the news didn't get Amber Alerts. The only difference I saw was that they were not white.

Sort of soured me on the program. 

It happens to me every time.

The first time I call a customer service line, it's a reconnaissance mission. I want to find out what I can get or what I can do, but I rarely want to make a decision on the spot. Salespeople will always push you into making decisions without thinking. That's how they make a sale. 

So that first call is just to set the stage. And the stage always seems to look beautiful.

That first person I call is ideal. They can hear me as well as I can hear them. They speak perfect English. They really WANT to help me.

And, I get the information I want in the way I want it, feeling that I can call back confident that they'll address my issue when, inevitably, I call back.

That's when it all falls to shit.

Calling back, I get someone who barely speaks my language. This person has never heard of the policy that first person quoted. "Who told you about that offer? I've never heard of it." Everything must be escalated, and it all eventually ends up in the crapper.

What is it about that second call?

I know I'm doing the right thing when I don't make snap decisions. I need time to consider or talk with my wife. But, in the end, I wind up gripping the handset with white knuckles and yelling so the guy can hear.

Maybe I just shouldn't talk to people.

Can you think of a store where you could buy a steam engine, and a package of Buck Rogers plastic army men?

I can.

The American Science & Surplus store is filled with many different kinds of awesome. It's a completely random assortment of cool toys and tools for just about anyone. Military surplus, lab equipment, telescopes, anatomical models, novelty items, terrariums, aquariums, robot kits, models, and rockets are just some of the things they carry.

You could just call it "A store for things that are cool," and you'd get the point. We went the other day and bought:

1) a wooden toy boat powered by a balloon
2) replacement bubble wands
3) miniature, flexible camera tripod
4) light-up yo-yo
5) box of 48 magnetic wooden letters

Considered buying a robot, but I know my 2-year old would destroy it.

I realized something in reading an article on Glen Beck today. The piece quoted Beck saying, "If you take what I say as gospel, you’re an idiot."

It made me think about these news entertainment shows and the propensity to throw up disclaimers regarding their own validity. Even comedy shows that I love, like The Daily Show, is guilty of this. Yeah, it isn't really a news show, but all they talk about is the news.

And they constantly have experts on, who also talk about the news.

So if the information they're providing isn't the news, what is it?

Satirical content, in my opinion, must be recognizable. Otherwise, it doesn't work.

But what Beck does isn't really satire. It's like Jerry Springer wrapped in an American flag.

A friend of mine mentioned the perception of time as a comparison to age. Many things have been written on how our perception of time changes as we age. Even Stephen King wrote a short story about it.

But he expressed this as a mathematical construct.

In other words, the percentage of life span represented by a given time unit (day, minute, etc.).

It made me think. So I started doing some figuring, using my son (aged two and a half) and myself (aged significantly more than that).

And after crunching a few numbers, I discovered that, using this formula, for every minute, hour or day that I experience, my son experiences 14.4 of them.

Every day I live is about two weeks' subjective time to him. Every minute is a quarter of an hour.

It's an interesting piece of trivia, but it's fundamentally flawed. I mean, mathematically quantifying perception is a slippery activity. We've been trying to do it for years.

Still, the next time I decide how long to put him in "time out", I might do a quick calculation first.

What made me want to post that Pale Blue Dot excerpt was this item from Michael Wesch.

He did The Machine is Us/ing Us...the viral video that first hit the web in January of 2007. Wesch's domain is Web 2.0, and he has done some interesting experiments into social networking.

But anthropology, RSS feeds, documentation, text mining, video streaming and the other sciences that exist out there don't account for the poetry and inspiration that can be found. Wesch's poem, owing to Sagan's beautiful essay, which owes to an image taken from a satelite 6.4 billion miles away, is poetry, not just by definition, but by execution.

The YouTube star and DJ called Kutiman is another example of this. He creates beautiful music using YouTube clips from all over the world. Each clip has its own story. Each contributor unaware of her contribution or the life her creation has taken on its own. I write these words that may cause someone else to write their own.

Is this the immortality that writers, poets, artists and composers wish? Imitation, collaboration and the lives of their works far transcending their own deaths?

You know what it makes me think about?

Shrek

Follow me for a second, here.

Shrek was, in many ways, a parody movie that lampooned and/or honored Disney fairy tale movies of the past 50 years. These movies (Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, etc.) were based off of fairy tales that were compiled by Mother Goose, the Grimm brothers and others. These compilations were simply collections of stories that the collectors heard...putting pen to them, and getting them published.

More than 350 years passed between the first known publication of Sleeping Beauty (Pentamerone, by Giambattista Basile II 1634) and Shrek.

Or, think about Leonardo DiCaprio. He was in Baz Luhrman's William Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet. Obvious connection, right? But not so obvious is Shakespeare's connection to William Painter's Palace of Pleasure, published a decade before Shakespeare's tale of star-crossed lovers, which included Arthur Brooke's The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet (1563): published 20 years before that.

And many believe that Brooke took his inspiration from a poem by Frenchman Pierre Boaistuau (1559), which was based on a poem by Italian Matteo Bandello, which was published in 1554.

So Shakespeare first publishes the piece in 1597. Not including the actual folklore that fed Bandello's poem, the story already existed for more than 40 years when he set pen to paper.

This confluence--this digital concatenation of content--merely speeds up the same thing that's been happening for centuries. From Bandello to DiCaprio. From Giambattista Basile to Mike Meyers. From Carl Sagan to Mike Wesch. While the printing press enabled events to lead to counter-events and cultures to spawn counter-cultures, blogs, user generated content and user filtered content has sped that up exponentially.

Have to wonder if this is going to keep up.

 

Excerpt from Pale Blue Dot, by Carl Sagan

This piece was written by Sagan upon seeing the image (to the left) of Earth as taken from Voyager 1 in 1990 from a distance of 6.4 billion miles.

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

-- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

Happened upon these the other day. They're remixes of YouTube clips by a person with the username of Kutiman. The first one (Mother of All Funk Chords) is the most widely circulated, but they're all pretty cool, in my estimation.

( Read more... )

There are more, but I don't want to post them all here.

Date:	2009-03-19 22:06
Subject:	Transmetropolitan Meat
Security:	Public
Mood:	confused

In the mid-90s, Transmetropolitan (created and written by Warren Ellis and Darrick Robertson) was a comic book that posited a very strange, dystopian America. One of the weird scientific/social changes of this future was that human cloning was legal, but only for the purpose of food.

Yes.

Clones for cannibalism.

So, when I first watched this piece on The Colbert Report, the first thing I thought of was Transmet.

As the PETA woman says in passing, you could eat dog! Yum! Imagine conscience-free meat choices. Baby seal. Bald eagle. Lion.

The options are limitless. But, honestly, I think I'd still have a tough time disassociating the animal from the lab-grown meat product.

Should we turn to People for the Ethical Treatment of Labmeat?

The first time I heard publishing people refer to books as "content" was about 7 years ago.

Suddenly, people wanted to distance themselves from the assumption that text was words printed on a page and bound into a book. Why, with "content", it could be anything! Multimedia was the buzzword of the 90's.

We don't just have text, but pictures! Video! Animation!

I remember selling children's books that had been given the "mulimedia" treatment: they'd take the artwork from the book and make some things clickable...then put it all on a CD-ROM that they would price at 3 or 4 times the price of the book. For that, the "reader" could click on a picture of a bird and it would tweet.

It was the first time I heard people talk about the "death of text." There's an assumption, there. The people who were saying "death of text" already didn't get it. They thought book=text. If you take away the book, you take away the text. People don't read. They click and watch things.

Didn't happen.

Remember the Rocket eBook? It's still available. I remember going to book conferences where huge booths announced the future of text. Each year, the booths got smaller and smaller, until they disappeared.

Don't get me wrong, here. I am not against technology. I am not a naysayer when it comes to the potential to deliver "content" to people in a way that is not in a bound, printed book (I've read that the new phrase for this is DTE...dead tree edition).

But here's the thing.

Every time a new technology wants to overtake an established practice, it does more than offer some great, whiz-bang design. It has to solve a problem far better than that established practice. It has to be impractical to continue to do it the old way.

Otherwise, why change?

Electronic delivery just never got it quite right. The devices were too expensive, the libraries weren't exhaustive enough, the "content" wasn't cheap enough...there's been far more reasons to not adopt. In most cases, the hard-core technophiles would jump on board, but there wouldn't be any legs to the sales. A year--maybe two--and you'd stop seeing it.

So here comes the Kindle...again. Is it different?

Functionally, not really. It's thinner, if that matters to you. The price is the same, which I think is an issue...particularly since I haven't heard about pricing for non-bestsellers going down. It has this "read to me" feature which is kind of nice...I guess...if the reason you like audio books is not in the performance of the story but the unmodulated dictation of it.

Several people have noted one item that was down-played in the press release: Kindle 2 will also sync with a range of mobile devices in the future. That, of course, fired the imaginations of some that an iPhone app is in the future.

But what's new here? Are we really talking about the death of the book as we know it?

The truth is that you need to really turn the aircraft carrier and the ocean on which it's sailing. You need everyone in the industry to be on board. You need publishers willing to provide "content" in a format that's cheap and that works. You need pricing (for both the device, and the content that the device delivers) that will draw people in. And, most of all, you need a public that's willing to make the leap.

There are ways in which DVDs are actually far worse than video cassettes. Recording on a DVD is much more expensive and a recordable DVD player isn't cheap. But there's a reason why DVDs overtook VCRs. It became silly to keep a VCR. DVDs offered a lot more.

That's what you need for the Kindle. You need to figure out what people want that they may not even know yet. And you need to do it at a price that people can afford. DVD players didn't really take off until they hit $100, and the movies for them were readily available.

Interesting call.

I've been thinking a lot, lately, about confidence and genius. We like to think about the mild-mannered nutty professor who shrinks from the spotlight, but true brilliance often comes from no more than listening to the voices that whisper inside.

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat Pray Love, talks about the burden of inspiration. She is a person that has never been encouraged to do what she loves. The practical minds around her would constantly counsel the folly of trying to make a living as one who lives by her own ideas.

Now that she's finally become successful, she has something else to worry about. Her book, a bestseller many times over, has tagged her as someone who should be concerned for a future where her greatest success is behind her.

And it is folly to think that you're going to be a bestselling author. It goes against probability, sense, and any kind of rational examination to think that you can overcome publishers, editors, retailers, reviewers and the capricious whims of the average reader to become a success.

And to do it twice?

The problem, though, is that inspiration and dedication can never be entirely rational.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said that, "A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within...Yet he dismisses without notice his thought, because it is his. In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty."

I recently rediscovered the movie, The Iron Giant, as I introduced it to my 2-year-old son. A central theme of the film is deciding who you are.

The giant is either the atomic menace--the enormous, robotic comic-book villain, Atomo--or Superman (hero and standard for all things good). What is he? Well, he's a giant metal robot who appears to be made as a weapon. Sounds like an Atomo to me.

But [big spoiler, here], at the end, when he flies through the air to sacrifice himself and save the people below, we believe him as he smiles and decides that he's really the avatar of Truth, Justice and the American way.

Fables like this reinforce our faith that hope is a real force. It has a genuine, measurable impact in our lives. Comic book columnist Jud Meyers recently posted a story called In Brightest Day that is an excellent example.

He was a lonely kid who skipped school to talk to the guy who writes his favorite funny book, and the editor-in-chief...one of the most powerful people in the industry...wound up changing the course of that kid's life.

Edison is the one who said that genius is far more perspiration than inspiration. Generally, that's interpreted as insight equating largely to hard work. However, I think we need to reinterpret that formula. If inspiration is only a small part of genius, a larger part...a preponderance...is dedication.

You need the stubborn confidence to decide who you are, and then stick to that definition regardless of what others think. You need to be like Henrietta the chicken. You need to decide you ARE Superman. You need to listen to those voices inside that inspire you. You need to journey to meet your heroes...and tell them what you really think.

Be confident against all reason and self-examination. In Apollo 13, Gene Kranz (as portrayed by Ed Harris), refuses to acknowledge that they are in the midst of a tragedy. He appears somewhat out of touch until the end when he succeeds. So do it. Be out of touch.

Well, on today...Charles Darwin's 200th birthday, I have to say I've been thinking about why ID is just flat wrong.

It isn't a difference of opinion. It isn't really up for debate. Flat out wrong.

If God is directing all the changes of evolution, then what about genetic mutation? Why would God direct a living creature to be functionally different, in any way, if it isn't beneficial?

Can you answer without pulling out the non-answer of God's "mysterious ways"?

Why is a person who is allergic to sunlight beneficial? Abraham Lincoln (whose birthday is also today, btw) had Marfan's syndrome. It's what caused him to be abnormally tall, with almost unendurable joint and back pain. How does that malady help a member of the species survive better?

And what about the species that are extinct? How does that fit? God points a finger and says, "this ENTIRE SPECIES deserves death," and then SNAP. They're gone.

I don't want to believe in that God. Honestly, I do believe in God. But I believe in a God of free will. I believe in a God who exists behind creation, not constantly fiddling with it.

Darwin was a Christian man. He believed in God. But he was also a realist and a scientist. He didn't feel the need to make up cacamamie hypotheses and try to pass them off as "theories."

Date:	2009-02-10 15:49
Subject:	Is that a real song?
Security:	Public
Mood:	amused
Music:	DJ Khaled, I'm So Hood

I have recently begun listening to music again.

That sounds weird, I know. But I used to just listen to my library of music if I wanted to hear something--spurred mostly by the idiocy of modern radio. Modern music asks a lot of its listeners. If you want to potentially hear new things, you have to either endure the horrible programming afforded by most radio stations (which, of course, is filtered through the modern version of payola) or you have to really research.

Honestly, I have neither the time or the inclination to sift through YouTube, FaceBook or MySpace (what is it with these concatenated names, anyway?) to find that one person who has genuine talent. Then I discovered Pandora.

I love Pandora.

Essentially, new music is sorted by analysts into pre-determined characteristics prior to being added to a database. Listeners can create "stations" based on specific genres, musicians or songs. Rating each song you hear with a thumbs up or down further filters your content.

In any case, it's meant that I'm listening to new music for the first time in almost 10 years.

Functionally, it's like I've emerged from a cave to see a ton of music that was out there, but invisible to me. So, when I say to people, "Hey, have you heard that song by Mos Def? It's incredible!" They inevitably look at me as if I just asked them what they thought of the hula hoop or the Edsel.

The other day, though, I was struck by a song that I thought was a hilarious parody: DJ Khaled's "I'm So Hood."

I grinned and thought about the sillyness of the song. I mean, from the hilarious opening that sounds stolen from LL Cool J to the reverb taken straight from Cher to the amazingly prepackaged chorus, it's not only difficult to take it seriously: it's impossible.

Even the video is like a remix of videos from the 90's.

And that chorus. I mean, I already mentioned it, but...it just...I mean, it sounds like NKOTB meets NSync meets Ice Cube.

Honestly, it doesn't say hip hop to me. It says this:


Seriously. Listen to it and tell me what you think.

Just heard about Kirsten Gillibrand replacing Hillary Clinton in her Senate seat.

Makes me wonder.

I mean, Barack Obama is a black man who's seat was filled by a black man. Hillary Clinton is a white woman who's seat was filled by a white woman.

The first, obvious question is, "Were these people selected for their vision, background and qualifications, or because they fit the demographic?"

And, the fact that the two governors involved are both beleaguered by scandal (Illinois far more than New York) doesn't help that perception. Anyone these two put in place would be scrutinized. I never thought Roland Burris would be allowed to actually sit, given the huge issues surrounding his assignment.

In the interviews surrounding his assignment, however, I don't think I've ever heard anyone say he wasn't qualified for the position. I've just heard people question him on why he'd accept such a minefield appointment.

As far as Gillibrand's assignment, most people point to Caroline Kennedy's poor showing in interviews prior to her assumed appointment.

Date:	2009-01-17 10:25
Subject:	Cold Weather Tips
Security:	Public
Mood:	working
Music:	Digital Underground

I've lived in a cold-weather climate all my life. I like it. The change of seasons gives you something to measure your life by. And now, with a child, I have an excuse once again to make snowballs, snowforts and snowmen.

But, having lived this long in a part of the world that can get below freezing, there are things that come naturally to me that don't to, say, my wife. My wife grew up in Southern California. Winters of this kind are a new thing to her.

She's used to a place where a thick pair of leggings and a light fleece jacket were all you needed to keep warm. Many of the lessons I took for granted are ones she never had to learn. These are things I absorbed practically by osmosis. I can't tell you who taught them to me or when. I just know it. Which made it tough to teach her. However, I thought, for those tropical people who have found themselves in cold climates, I'd give a list of tips.

1. Layers
You've probably heard this before, but it bears repeating. Layering your clothes does several things. A) It allows you to remove a layer or two when you get indoors or the weather changes. B)More layers mean more heat trapped. After all, your clothing doesn't generate heat: you do. All your clothing does is trap your own heat close to your body. Even an expensive North Face or L.L. Bean jacket may not be as warm as a parka over a fleece over a sweater over a warm shirt.

2. Thermal Underwear (aka "thermals", "long underwear", or "long johns")
Let's say you wanted to go into the cold, wearing only a button-down denim shirt. Do you think you'd be warm? How long until frostbite set in? Well, then, why do people think it's okay to walk out into the cold only wearing a pair of jeans with nothing underneath them?

3. Cotton and Wool are better underneath
While thick sweaters and sweatshirts are warm, it just takes a single stiff wind to make them useless. Wind can drastically cut your body's temperature, and is frequently far colder than the general temperature (more on that later). Your best bet is to wear either close-knit, thick wool or some nylon/polyester blend on the outside, with your open-knit sweaters or cotton sweatshirts underneath.

4. Wind Chill is REAL
You know how "it's not the heat, it's the humidity"? Well, it's not the temperature, it's the wind chill. Icy winds drastically impact the temperature, and can lower the effective temp by as much as 20 degrees. Dress yourself for the wind chill, and you should be okay.

5. 8 minutes if it's below zero
That's about how long it takes for exposed skin to get frostbite. You should try to cover as much skin as possible. Wear something over your face. WEAR A HAT, not some dinky earmuffs or one of those idiotic stretchy rings. Make sure there's no gap between your gloves and your sleeves. Tuck your pants into your boots.

6. A word about frostbite
Whenever they do a piece on frostbite on the news or write about it in those "hypochondriac's bibles", they trot out the pictures of extremities that have gone black and dead...gangrenous and about to be amputated. Most of these people want to make sure all their bases are covered. It is true that if you stay out too long in the cold, your tissues can be killed off. But the reality is that the less serious versions of frostbite are far more common.

Common frostbite is very similar to a first degree burn. The damage to your skin is about the same. Symptoms are redness, swelling and a burning sensation. When you come in, warm up, but don't try to add intense heat to the area. That'll just make matters worse. If you really want to heat up quickly, soak the area in warm (NOT HOT) water.

Care for the frostbite about the same way you'd treat sunburn.

If the area appears waxy, pale and is completely numb, even after the rest of you is warmed up, that's when you should get worried and go to the doctor.

7. Breathe through your nose
Cold air can damage your lungs. If it's cold enough, a few minutes outside and you'll feel like a smoker who just inhaled 2 packs of cigarettes in 2 minutes. One way to mitigate this is to simply make sure you're only inhaling through your nose. I know, it seems silly. Most people breathe through their nose, anyway. But it's odd how you'll find yourself mouth-breathing...even without realizing it.

It's amazing how your body's designed. Your primary input for air is your nose. It's designed to moisturize and warm the air before it gets to your lungs. Your mouth, by contrast, moisturizes the air at the expense of your saliva: giving you cotton mouth. It also doesn't really warm the air at all--taking the cold straight into your lungs and flash-freezing them.

8. Scarves aren't just cute accessories.
It kills me when I see some guy in a "power" tie wearing a Burberry coat and a tiny cashmere scarf casually draped behind his neck. I have no idea why he's wearing the thing. Honestly, I never know why he's wearing the coat. Generally, he just goes from the heated garage to his car.

Scarves exist for a reason. They cover your neck and face. If you don't want a scarf, you can wear a ski mask, but scarves are a little more versatile. The great advantage to something covering your mouth and nose is that, as you exhale, the cloth is trapping that warmth against your face.

Batman is dead.

Over the course of the next few weeks, I'm sure you'll hear about it.

Blurbs on major news outlets will talk about it. They may even talk about the image of his grizzly corpse being held by Superman....the final panel of Final Crisis #6.

What do I think?

Well, it's tough to say.

I think that comic book characters should be allowed to die. I think that holding onto the past and updating it for today is a cop-out. Today is today, and today's ideas should replace those of yesterday. If you want to call back to yesterday, by all means do it, but don't take it whole cloth and try to repackage it as something new.

Bruce Wayne has wavered between age 20 and age 40 since his inception: almost 70 years ago. DC Comics has created numerous replacements for him: male and female. But they've also kept him on: not aging, even as Dick Grayson (his "young ward") went from a pre-pubescent youngster to an adult. It's silly having these heroes that have been around for ages operating alongside their youthful replacements.

I loved the book, Starman, but there were scenes in it that were necessarily ironic and silly because of this. Jack Knight (a character that's been around since 1994) talking about how Alan Scott (a character that's been around since 1940) is an original that predates all these johnny-come-lately heroes like Batman (a character that's been around since 1939).

So I think Bruce Wayne should die. Circle of life. All that. Stories are stories, and they need to have an ending.

That said, I don't know. What story would be big enough to be the end of a character that's lasted for 70 years? I can't even think of an allegory, here. I mean, the character has existed and been CONSISTENTLY WRITTEN ABOUT since before World War II. I mean, Batman encouraged people to buy war bonds. He tried to get people to plant Victory Gardens.

What kind of an end would be fitting? Is this it?

And I'm not kidding myself. I know that this isn't REALLY the end. I know that he'll be back. It may be a week or it may be a year, but I know Bruce Wayne will be back, and pretty quickly. Superman was only dead for a year in the 90's. Maybe it'll be that long, here.

In any case, what does this mean? A desperate gambit for sales? The culmination of a big storyline with a big ending? New and interesting places to take this character and those closest to him?

Well, if it's done well, it's probably a bit of all those. We'll see, though. We'll see.

I love Google Trends. Don't ask me why. I guess I like Top 10 lists that are completely objective. I mean, it's one of the few purely democratic polls out there. No focus groups or manipulation.

Anyway, I visit Google Trends from time to time to find out what search phrases are hot. It's always changing, and can reveal some interesting things about how news cycles work (not to mention how big media agencies can manipulate them).

Today, when I visited it, I found a couple interesting pieces. Weirdly, most people seem to have concatenated Meghan McCain and the Boston schoolteacher who admitted to sleeping with a 13 year-old boy 300 times. Not sure why that is, but "Related searches" groups them together for some reason. Weird, right?

But, looking through there, I found a video of Sarah Palin vainly trying to sound...I don't know...smart?

Apparently a documentary is being/has been made, called "How Obama Got Elected." In it, Palin is interviewed. It lasts for 9 minutes. If you're at all tied in, you may have heard of it already.

Most of the sites that link to it do so as a joke, but I have to say this is a subject of interest to me. I honestly am curious how Obama got elected: not because I think he wasn't the best person for the job, but because the odds were stacked so high against him. Many have said that, at any other time, after any other president, it never would have happened. That may be, but I'd be interested in seeing some data around it.

Anyway, going to the website, it becomes clear pretty quickly that there's an agenda involved. First off, the logo for the site is the now-familiar blue, red and black line drawing of Obama with a halo added for effect. Scrolling through the front page, the quantity of red, white and blue borders and inclusion of a flag also seem to suggest a more conservative platform.

Reading through the site, all kinds of news pieces are embedded from MSNBC and FOX News. But the real, statistical center to the whole thing seems to be a poll conducted by Zogby. According to the documentarian, 13 of the questions asked in the poll, and the responses associated with them, seem to show that no one knew anything about Obama. People just went with who the media already had selected.

"The media". You know, that big, bad entity that makes our decisions for us?

So, these 13 questions were facts about Obama, McCain, Biden and Palin. The idea is that these people had no idea what the correct answers were.

Unfortunately, the actual poll was posted, so we can read for ourselves.

The actual poll was 24 questions, but included some demographic information that wasn't relevant (except when you got to the part that said 74% of respondents were white, and 49% were suburban (with 26% urban and 19% rural).

In any case, here is the damning evidence:
( Poll excerpt )

So what does this mean? Most people don't know about Biden's schizo comment about Obama being tested in his first six months? Obama's slip-up, where he said he'd campaigned in 57 states (unless, of course, he meant (wait for it) 57 Islamic states...dun dun DUUUNNNN)?

What important fact was included in this survey that truly would have swayed voters? You could argue that his "skyrocket" comment, and the way Obama won his first election could be factors, but you could give equal weight to McCain's Charles Keating fiasco. And that "government should redistribute wealth" comment? A flat out misrepresentation. What Obama said was that "It’s not that I want to punish your success,” Obama explained. “I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you, that they’ve got a chance for success too. My attitude is that if the economy’s good for folks from the bottom up, it’s gonna be good for everybody … I think when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.”

What does that mean? Well, it could mean many things, but to translate it into "government should redistribute wealth" is clearly an interpretation of an actual quote. As such, NO one said it.

I went into this wondering, "How could Obama win, when he was facing a popular candidate? How could a black man beat a white man, when this presidential race made it more clear than ever that racism is alive and well in America?" But I think (and this is pure conjecture on my part) that the guy doing this documentary had an entirely different question in his mind: "How could we lose?"

I'll tell you, my friend.

Sneaky little dicks like you.

Sneaky little dicks that are the exact opposite of Google Trends. Who massage data until it tells their own story. Who say that the "media" somehow influenced the election, when the final weeks of the election were devoted to McCain's hate mongering speeches and Palin's blatant mischaracterizations. How could you lose? People don't like you.

I'm speaking figuratively, of course.