Off the Mark: Cartoons for laughing at

Hey! I’ve had my first email from someone who only knows of me by reading this weblog. From David Allen and the unconventional minds at Plan Nine Publishing, cartoonist Mark Parisi brings us his third collection, The off the mark Science Fiction Picture Show. Laugh at Buffy, Star Trek, Teletubbies in ‘toons heavily influenced by The Far Side style of Gary Larson. Plan 9 also carries Sluggy Freelance, Bill Dave, and Nukees. Check’em out!

Well, the bad news continues

In the mid-quarter update, Michael Lehman (Sun CFO) blamed Europe for Sales Drop, although others pointed to resales from dead and dying dot-coms for some of the drop in the sales. New expectations are for $3.8-4.0 billion in sales for the current quarter compared to the previous forecast of $4.4 billion, with earnings per share at 2-4 cents versus 6 cents. The stock was trading below $18 in the after market.

Goodbye: Wall of Sound

Sad to say, one of my favorite music sites, part of the Go.com/Disney empire, is saying Goodbye as of June 1. I need to find a new place for reviews of new music releases, suggestions anyone? And no, Rolling Stone won’t do.

The Giggle Protocol

The giggle protocol has been developed after literally man-minutes of discussion and coding. An extension of current, yet limited internet standards we felt it necessary to create a new one, for the purposes of distributed giggling. Naturally, much like the act of a giggle itself all details and code for the giggle protocol are completely opensourced, and available from this webpage, free for all to download.

So say the developers. I have no clue what this does but it just sounds funny.

Pearl Harbor Blows

Pearl Harbor takes the Titanic formula to World War II. Every critic in the country says the movie’s crap. Audiences love it to the tune of a $75 million opening weekend, big but not the biggest for the most expensive movie ever made. Can Disney do it again with “Pearl 2”? Want to read why it sucks?

Today’s Movies: Coyote Ugly, Finding Forrester

Take five gorgeous women and put them in a rowdy bar as the bartenders, with one as an innocent, aspiring songwriter and you have the basics of Coyote Ugly. Lots of dancing by the ‘Coyotes’ on top of the bar and a sweet love story for the innocent songwriter and you have the rest. A fun, if predictable, movie with a nice cameo by John Goodman as a dad.

Gus Van Sant found a very profitable, critic-friendly story to tell in Good Will Hunting and it is hard to understand why he and the studio decided to tell it again in Finding Forrester. Our protagonist (Matt Damon/Rob Brown) is buried in obscurity until found by an academic (Stellen Skarsgaard/unknown) and with the help of an outside tutor (Robin Williams/Sean Connery), finds his way to (at least the potential for) a successful life. Very Hollywood but done well both times. Matt Damon, the lead in Good Will Hunting, has a small role at the end in this one. GWH had a few more artistic touches (such as the Ben and Casey Affleck roles) and FF more closely hews to the Studio Rules.

Today’s Book: Batman – No Man’s Land

Gotham City has been hit by a major earthquake and two rounds of epidemic disease, then cut off from the rest of the U.S. by political decree proclaiming it a No Man’s Land, and the Batman is missing in action. That’s where Greg Rucka starts us in No Man’s Land. He does a good job in building the tension in the decimated city with Joker, Two Face, Black Mask, Bane, Penguin, and even Lex Luther (minus Superman). Our hero has Robin, Nightwing, Oracle, a new Batgirl, and Commissioner Jim Gordon on his side as he roams the night protecting and reclaiming the turf.

Big Bat fans will probably also want to check out DC Comic’s re-imagining of the Caped Crusader by Stan Lee

Today’s Movie: Shrek

Want laughs? See Shrek, it’s as simple as that. There are constant jokes, many out of Donkey’s (Eddie Murphy’s) mouth. Mike Myers uses just the right amount of restraint on his Scottish accent (shades of I Married An Axe Murderer) as the title character, Cameron Diaz plays the princess with good ups and downs, and John Lithgow plays to form as the bad Lord Farquaad. Through in lots of pop culture references (Disney, Matrix, the Monkees) and it’s a 90 minute ride to Storybook Funnyville.

Yesterday’s Movie: Laughter on the 23rd Floor

Neil Simon has written some incredible plays and movies over the last 50 years, including The Odd Couple and The Sunshine Boys. In this made for Showtime film, Simon looks back at the place he started, working as a staff writer on the Sid Caesar TV shows of the 1950s. The reviews were pretty good but I was disappointed; the script couldn’t decide whether to go for pathos over the booze and pills decline of the show’s star and the amazing humor in the writers’ room.

Yesterday’s Book: First Contract

A new novel by Greg Costikyan, First Contract is a very funny story of what might happen if aliens contact us and they’re hardcore business types. Beside 50% unemployment in the U.S., some of them are really hardcore–like the Grishneg, who enforce contracts with planet-killing seriousness. Definitely recommended.

Your process hath shuffled off this mortal coil

If Shakespeare wrote error messages, would they still be sweet as a rose? Noted by the author: Almost everything here is bowlderized from Hamlet, except for the obvious one from Macbeth. Quite entertaining in an uber-geeky kind of way.

Today’s Book: The Street

And I do mean today’s book: this was one thriller that kept me turning the pages all day until I finished it. Lee Gruenfeld has cynically captured the feverish quality of the recently ended Internet investment boom in a mystery novel that ratchets up the tension until an ending you won’t be expecting. Recommended

Surgery tomorrow

I’ll be going in to have my three wisdom teeth removed tomorrow morning–just like a vacation, huh?–and so this log may be quiet for a few days. Cards and letters always welcome.

Humor: Anti-MS Flying Joke

Out of the email ether, author unknown: A helicopter was flying around above Seattle when an electrical malfunction disabled all of the aircraft’s electronic navigation and communications equipment. Due to the clouds and haze, the pilot could not determine the helicopter’s position. The pilot saw a tall building, flew toward it, circled, and held up a handwritten sign that said ‘WHERE AM I?’ in large letters. People in the tall building quickly responded to the aircraft, drew a large sign, and held it in a building window. Their sign said ‘YOU ARE IN A HELICOPTER.’ The pilot smiled, waved, looked at his map, determined the course to steer to SEATAC airport, and landed safely. After they were on the ground, the copilot asked the pilot how he had done it.

“I knew it had to be the Microsoft Building, because they gave me a technically correct but completely useless answer.”

Are we living in a pyrotechnic universe?

In Before the Big Bang, There Was . . . What?, Dennis Overbye of the NY Times reports on recent developments in the world of cosmology. The big question (as it has been for a long time) is where did the universe come from, or, what caused the Big Bang. Researchers are pinning their hopes on emerging theories that unify Einsteinian Relativity with Quantum Mechanics, “a unified theory of quantum gravity–two views of the world, one describing a continuous curved space-time, the other a discontinuous random one.” Currently, string theory is being pursued as the best hope for solving the convergence. Still this is an interesting article with reasonable speculations about what might have come before the Big Bang. Where did “it” all come from is something the scientists are nowhere near ready to tackle, though.

Lord of the Rings Media Kit

New Line Cinema has posted a really nice LotR Media Kit to the films’ website based on the kit distributed during the recent Cannes Film Festival. Some good detail on the graphics and special effects work going into the trilogy.

Meanwhile, The American Prospect has a good article on Tolkien scholarship and the controversies it engenders today.

Where in the world is tolerance?

I look and look and look but it doesn’t ever seem to get better. For example, the ruling Taliban is forcing Hindus to wear tags in Afghanistan, eerily reminiscent to the Nazi policy forcing Jews to wear yellow stars. In the Middle East, Israelis and Palestinians are unable to stop killing each other. In Northern Ireland, the peace accord is close to falling apart. Multiple ethnic conflicts continue in Eastern Europe, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, and Africa. Even on a smaller level, incidents continue to occur across the U.S.

When will people realize that it’s really a small planet and we have to learn to live together on it before we kill everyone?

Today’s Book: Mystery Train

Greil Marcus wrote Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ‘n’ Roll Music, one of the earliest books of rock and roll criticism as literature, back in 1973-74 but it still holds up well. Probably that’s due not only to his writing talent, which is important, but also because none of the artists he covers have done significant work since then. Marcus writes about, in order, Harmonica Frank, Robert Johnson, The Band, Sly Stone, Randy Newman, and Elvis Presley. True, Newman has had some chart success in the last 25 years and The Band’s Robbie Robertson has done interesting solo work but nothing that matches the importance of the early recordings covered in this book.

Although Marcus does spend a reasonable portion of his pages on the actual music and a good few on biographical material, the meat focuses on these musicians and how their work reflects on and motivates American culture. His focus is on the tension between ambition and ease, the two conflicting aspects of the American Dream. I think I understand the choices he made in his artist selections (The Band over Dylan, Sly Stone over Stevie Wonder or Marvin Gaye, Newman over Brian Wilson), given the focus he was looking for, and the book is insightful and interesting.

Marcus is clearly an important writer: he has his own fan websites. Not to mention a platoon of imitators such as Dave Marsh (much as I like his two Springsteen books). Speaking of Springsteen, reading this it occured to me that The Boss must have read this book when it came out; I swear I can hear resonances of it on Born to Run and Darkness on the Edge of Town.

Disney and Pearl Harbor: Incredible Success or a Day That Will Live in Infamy?

On the one hand, the Telegraph (UK newspaper) is reporting that Critics torpedo £100m Pearl Harbor. On the other, Wall Street is looking for a smash, pushing Disney stock up over 5% in today’s trading. The Telegraph article isn’t making me any more eager to see the film, at 165 minutes long, with 100 of those spent leading up to the Japanese attacke, 40 minutes recreating the attack (in admittedly spectacular fashion), and then 25 minutes or so wrapping up the rest of World War II. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Updated 5/22: Online sources are reporting that Disney plans to trim part of the ending that might offend Japanese and German sensibilities for showings in those markets. A source said: “We’ve tried very hard not to portray the Japanese in a very bad light. They are a huge market and accounted for 20 per cent of profits for Titanic.” As usual, money talks. Japanese Americans are already protesting the film. Floyd Mori, president of the Japanese American Citizens League, America’s largest Asian American civil rights organization, said the film “could fuel hatred of Americans of Asian descent and he said Japanese groups around the United States have heightened security measures out of fear of a backlash.”