What's the difference between Venus or Serena Williams winning the Wimbledon Women's Final? I mean qualitatively, since these two women have so much in common that to the average spectator, for instance someone like me who'll maybe only watch Wimbledon and the US Open (and the French Open when not boycotting France), to the non-fanatical, non-denominational tennis audience, what's the difference between either of the Williams sisters winning the final? There is NONE! These two are ruining tennis--inspiring yawns, driving television ratings down. I couldn't care less which of them wins. I have no intention of watching it. And that sucks because I've really enjoyed the Women's finals at Wimbledon in the past. I miss Martina Hingis.

Since I've been on a movie rant lately, somebody asked me what I thought about the new Star Wars, Attack of the Killer Cyber-Jedi. I think that the responsibility of the role of Custodian of Star Wars should have never been entrusted to its creator. Those who value it more than he should have seized it from him, taken it from that dungeon of Skywalker Ranch, and brought it to a place where it might grow naturally, according to the laws of nature and reason (just as the Superfriends in Atlas Shrugged rescue John Galt from the clutches of those who would do him harm and return him to the Valley of the Second Eden where he gets to hang around in bed all day with the railroad lady). Um--yeah. There are many accomplished film makers who would have parted with an untold number of body parts for the opporturnity to make a Star Wars episode. They could have supplied more energy, more commitment, and better understanding of Star Wars than its creator has demonstrated in two decades. Where's Robin Hood when you need him?

I'm reading in Infoworld (which is a great tech pub btw if you're into that sort of thing) that MS released the production version of J# today. This would be pretty cool if not for Sun Microsystems. While the J# PM states they expect some percentage of Java developers to cross platforms (heh, a pun), Sun smugly points out that the tool is based on and limited to the Java 1.1 language spec as a result of litigation. (Java is currently at version 1.4.) David Harrah, a Sun marketing goon, according to Infoworld, accused MS of leaving its J++ developers "high and dry" without language evolution or support--as if this were MS's fault! I can understand Sun wanting to protect its Java franchise, and I do understand that MS went somewhat tangential with J++, locking it to the MS platform (mainly in its hooks for developing GUIs, which to be honest are far superior to Java's native GUI support), but to settle the dispute in a courtroom by freezing J++ at version 1.1 (which Sun had fully licensed to MS--it was all perfectly legal), and then turn around and blame them for abandoning their users, stinks of vituperation. If I were Sun I would be endeavoring to make people forget the floods of lawyers sent to siege Redmond and chip away at their successes, and instead focus on what's good about Java 4. An honest competitor advances on his own merits.

This reminds of the late attempts by some members of the Democratic Party at linking the President with ENRON-esque corporate corruption charges (pertaining to some gray stock trades a decade ago). This is the desperate attempt by a losing chess player at an obvious gambit to win his opponent's queen, hoping that by some miracle of Morpheus it won't be noticed. In chess, a player advances from the (subjective) rank of amateur when he stops playing to his opponent's potential mistakes and starts playing from his own strengths (and advances to master when he makes the transition back again, but that's another analogy...). The difference is a matter of personal integrity. The person who can only capitalize upon error is doing nothing more than occupying a niche left vacant by another; he is nothing more than the most basic evolving animal. The one who improves himself by attacking his own capacity for mistake is the one who may eventually prove his greatness.

I'm curious: did the US become a great nation by pointing out how much other countries sucked?

Here be spoilers for those of you actually fearful of spoiling the Scooby Doo movie.

I saw Scooby Doo tonight, which wasn't entirely my idea, but sometimes concessions have to be made in order to get a girl to sit on your couch (yeah, I said couch--this was an illegal screen grab that some stranger sent me for no reason). When I was a kid, I loved Scooby Doo (Saturday morning, big bowl of Honeycomb cereal), and when I was in college I loved deconstructing Scooby Doo (Saturday night, big bowl of--well, you get the idea). But as was the case with the Grinch movie, I wasn't too thrilled that Hollywood was exercising its theoretical rights on the property and casting it from cartoon to living color. (Damn, VN, check out that pun complex!) Anyway, my distaste wasn't disappointed, but it wasn't entirely validated either (as with the terrible terrible Grinch movie).

Somehow Warner Bros. managed to get mixed up and made the sequel to Scooby Doo before the first one. This movie had all the typical elements of a sequel, all the attempts at bellowing something new into an otherwise fixed vehicle (which is usually a mistake, I think--I'm always happy to see a movie version of a television program that does pretty much the same thing it did on television, which is what for instance the Star Trek movies do). Mystery Inc. breaks up in this movie, they argue a lot, have interpersonal difficulties, Shaggy neglects Scooby in favor of a female (see Harlan Ellison's "A Boy and His Dog", a story with a much more satisfying ending than this one), personalities switch bodies for a blessedly brief period of time (which always spells desperation coupled with disaster), and an old character returns to complicate things. I don't know, maybe the writers (and if ever there was a film written by a committee...) watched too many of the original episodes and somehow figured it would be stale to rehash any of them, or even make an homage to them (which is what for instance the Brady Bunch movie did, with much greater success than the Scooby crew managed).

But the dog, wow, the dog is great! I want that dog! He could be my buddy! The dog is the best part of this movie; some team spent a hellova lotta time on him, and their efforts should be commended. I'm still pretty sure that was a real talking dog. Maybe someday they'll make an Adam Selene and take over the world with it.

The last interesting thing about Scooby Doo The Motion Picture is that it gave Rowan Atkinson a big screen role that finally wasn't Mr. Bean. They didn't let him do much with it, but it was nice to see a little more Black Adder and a little less slapstick from an actor who is underappreciated and underused.

TV Guide has crossed the line. I'm done with those filthy swine! These self appointed David Humes of television have published a list of the 50 so-called worst television shows ever, with the Jerry Springer Show at the top--not arguing, but it smells funny--followed by something called "My Mother the Car", whatever that was, the XFL, and the Brady Bunch Hour (which was apparently some kind of post-Brady variety show featuring the musical talents of said Bunch). Not much of a problem here, you say, shrugging your shoulders, preparing to move on, but then--then--bewilderingly, maddeningly, outrageously placed at the number 5 spot, bearing the title of fifth Worst Show Ever, they have none other than the beloved, dare I say revered classic of all classics, a glaring anachronism, Hogan's Heroes! Oh the humanity!

The lovable Sergeant Schultz! The daffy and absurdly incompetent Commandant Klink! The wildly rabid SS Major Hochstetter! The fat drooling General Burkhalter! The listening device in the coffee pot, the Stalag riddled with underground tunnels, the guard dogs who growled at the guards and licked the hands of the prisoners! Hogan's Heroes!

This means--and get this--this means that according to TV Guide, Hogan's Heroes was a worse television show than The Dukes of Hazzard! Worse than Baywatch! Worse than Airwolf and Manimal and the Magic Johnson Late Night Show! Worse than Bachelorettes in Alaska for the love of God!

How might they attempt to defend this horrid injustice? According to CNN, the magazine found the show "politically incorrect in retrospect." That bears repeating: "politically incorrect in retrospect." It's bad enough when academia and the media insist upon revising the past into conformity with their artificial present, but now I need to listen to the same from a TV index? It cannot be long before our appreciation of Bogart is modified due to the cigarette between his lips (that is assuming Spielberg doesn't digitally replace it with a lollypop stick), before Bewitched is benighted for belittling the Wiccan religion, before we are told that Huckleberry Finn is a bad novel because of a few censurable words in its text (oh wait, that's already happened). What, after all, could the audience know?

I guess my question is simple: When and how exactly did the mainstream media begin to assign cultural norms rather than reflect them? When and how did we start letting them?

33 years ago this morning, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins sat atop a Saturn V rocket (wild eyed Von Braun made dizzy by his machine, the largest expendable launch vehicle ever put into service: 363 feet tall, its 5 Rocketdyne F-1 engines brewing over 7.5 million pounds of thrust, 160 million horsepower (take all the moving water in North America, run it through a vast array of turbines, then double the energy produced) and soon to rise rise rise; the same rocket that Borman, Lovell, and Anders rode in '68, when they bridged the gap between God and Man for one shining, unearthly moment; look at it out there on the pad at Launch Complex 39-A, simmering, all about the future), and attempted to understand the enormity of their task and the magnitude of their endeavor (figuring the odds of success were around 50-50, and the odds of getting out alive only slightly better; they'd watched Grissom, White, and Chaffee die in the fire on Pad 34 while testing for Apollo 1 two years earlier, and they'd seen the engines fail for Apollo 6 only last year), up there at another cusp of history, about to help redefine man's understanding of himself and his place in the universe, contemplating infinity and close to taking another bite from it. In just four days, the LM-5 module of the Apollo 11 would land on the moon: "HOUSTON, TRANQUILITY BASE HERE. THE EAGLE HAS LANDED."




Well done.

This kind of story fills me with mirth, as in "great merriment". This so-called "radical Muslim cleric" in London named Abu Hamza al-Masri has declared, much to the shock and dismay of reasoning beings everywhere, that if the US attacks Iraq it would incur the retaliation of al-Qaeda. "Sympathizers with al Qaeda would attack the Americans," he said. Well, we wouldn't want that, would we? They don't have any such agenda right now, do they? This isn't the most absurdly worthless, blatantly useless, and remarkably stupid statement ever, is it?

What is with these guys who have nothing left but bluster and threats, hot wind roiling over their quivering lips, mad eyes made dim by the feedback of the buzzing within their skulls, that they must weekly, daily bombard us with their impotent predictions of our imminent demise, their confident assurances of retaliation, their ostentatious winks presumably meant to frighten us into... what? Fearing them? Killing them? Or do they hope to summon back some suicidal courage now found lacking in their vast armies of glorious martyrs polishing the sword of Allah's wrath, each now fully confident of the inevitability of a world spanning dar al-Islam? What exactly makes them believe that more such idle prattle is better than less, is better than for instance keeping their gibbering mouths shut? Small children seek less attention from the adults around them.

So now the Palestinians have taken to dressing up like IDF soldiers so that civilians will trust them and come closer, and not suspect, and not fall victim to their terrible prejudices against Palestinians (how dare they), and get massacred by machine gun fire in the middle of the road like dogs. It's the limbo, mon, how low can you go?

The comedy continues in VA! Moussaui (however it's spelled), that nutter who missed his flight to a grave in Western PA, has accused his judge of "suffering from an acute case of Islamaphobia" (which I believe is also known as Rationality) as well as from "gender inferiority". Wow, this guy really knows how to lay on the sweet-talk, eh?

I'm spending more time in NY lately because work is dry and brittle here in Philly. One thing that's good is you don't have to walk for more than 2 blocks in order to find a Starbuck's and a pack of $8 cigarettes; the trick is in picking the right direction. So when I land in some office, I early make the requisite scouting maneuvers, a 2 block spiral pattern in search of the green and white sign with that frolicsome nymphish looking woman drawn upon it (and assuming the name Starbuck's is from Moby Dick and not Battlestar Galactica, just where does that woman come from, some unrecorded drug-dream of Queequeg's?--"For whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books"). This week, it took some greater extent of searching than is normal, and I feared my theory's disputation, even widened the spiral out: 3 blocks, 4, growing impatient, worried about the coming coffee-free months that seemed looming ahead of me, failing to find that sign. But then only after I'd given up, I was told that the green haired girl was within a building, with nary a sign to the outside at all, and but 1/2 block from me at that. "Oh, devilish tantalization of the gods!" Ah, but my girl, she sometimes likes to hide.

A controversy in nyc now is what to build in place of the big hole downtown where the World Trade Center was wrecked by a bunch of losers with minds filled by dishwashing detergent. After scrolling through a list of mostly unimpressive and unsatisfying building designs, there's now a strong movement to replace the WTC with the same exact thing. I think this is the only real option if we want to maintain a sense of pride--that or build them even bigger than before, maybe bigger than the Sears Tower (mostly just to piss off Chicago). But there's something very compelling about building the same thing. Remember the Grinch story? When on Christmas morning after the Grinch tried to ruin everything, the thing that finally broke him was when the Whos came out and did exactly what they'd always done, behaving as if nothing different had happened, just as happy and content and Whovian as before. But then, following that logic, we would have to stop bombing the hell out of Osamabad, and those guys just haven't been bombed enough yet.

Advertising has killed the exclaimation point, it's useless now, it's worthless, it doesn't mean a thing!