June 2008 Archives

Eileene has been looking forward to Wanted for some time; she really enjoyed Night Watch (Nochnoi Dozor), and wanted to see how director Timur Bekmambatov would perform with a large budget and a Hollywood studio. I attended out of a sense of spousal duty, because Eileene made the mistake of buying the comic book upon which the movie is based, and then made the second mistake of letting me read it. Judging by the trailer, Wanted would be a more-or-less standard action flick, with fetishistic close-up shots of bullets in flight and a loose grasp of natural law and an inexplicable hot chick, but the source material worried me.

Happily, Bekmambatov shows the same cheerful disregard for his source material using Wanted, the comic, as he did using Night Watch, the novel, and pretty well completely rewrites the whole story. After we watched the movie, Eileene went back and re-examined the comic for points of similarity. She found four, and I added the last.

1. The central character’s name is the same: Wesley Gibson. (Calling Wesley a “protagonist” in the comic would abuse the notion that the protagonist propels some kind of action forward.
2. He starts the story in a crap job, aware that his nominal best friend is fucking his girlfriend.
3. Some people die. Some of these die because Wesley shoots them.
4. Wesley meets his father, presumed dead.
5. Wesley suffers regular beatings in training to toughen him up.

…aaaaand that’s about it. The nature of the conspiracy he joins, the nature of his father, his father’s crucial relationship with the conspiracy, the nature of the plot—heck, the very existence of a plot—these are all changed.

Good job, too. The comic reads like it comes from a maladjusted ten-year-old who is just beginning to learn to swear in earnest. In the comic, Wesley and his friends aren’t hyperactive assassins; they’re outright supervillains. Yes, supervillains, because the maladjusted ten-year-old mentality is angry at the world, and superheroes don’t get to kill everyone they hate. Which is everyone. What’s Wesley’s superpower? He’s really good at killing people. That's it. No laser-beam eyes or flying or super-speed, just killing people. What’s his inventive supervillainous handle? “The Killer.” Isn’t that so fucking cool you could just wet your pants? Way cooler than someone with real superpowers, and way, way cooler than the guy made out of the shit of the 666 evilest people in the whole world, including Hitler. He and his supervillain friends took over the world already, and part of the initiation is just running free, brutally killing everyone who ever pissed you off and raping anyone who takes your fancy, because that’s what the maladjusted ten-year-old would like to do. And they get to travel to alternate universes and kill the superheroes all over again, any time they want, because they’re that cool. And they all belong to a super-secret conspiracy, which is why you’ve never heard of them. And they get to tell cops and bosses and even mean old teachers to fuck off any time they want, and the authorities have to cower in fear, because somehow they all know about the super-secret conspiracy the rest of us have never herad of and know they have to obey. But Wesley will probably kill and rape them anyway, because he can. And they get to rewrite history any time they want, so it never really matters when they fuck something up anyway., which is mostly everyone, because they figuratively fuck everyone up the ass all the time. It’s the worst thing the maladjusted ten-year-old can possibly think of, ass-fucking. And he thinks about it a lot. Waaay to much, if you catch my drift. And when even other supervillains break their truce, Wesley can kill them all, too, all at once, because he's just that cool. And, and, and Wesley probably rapes you in the ass, too, and you just don’t know it because his friends can fuck with your head that way, and he makes you cry and beg him to stop, but then he and his superpowered friends rewrite history so you’re really a faggot and you really like it, and beg him to do it again, but Wesley won’t because he’s powerful and cruel and he has a hot girlfriend already anyway who bangs him all the time for no particular reason and he shoots you anyway and then he goes back in time to put you through it all again only this time you’re a faggot the whole time and his friends rape you in the ass too, including this one made out of shit and…

Well, you get the idea. It’s not just shallow adolescent power fantasy material, it’s stupid shallow adolescent power fantasy material, something to make you feel embarrassed on the author's behalf because he hasn't the good sense to feel embarrassed for himself. It fails to shock with its rudeness and depravity, which is the author’s intent, although it may surprise you with its banality.

And the movie? Well, it’s a more-or-less standard action flick, with fetishistic close-up shots of bullets in flight and a loose grasp of natural law and an inexplicable hot chick. Go ahead and see it if you like that kind of thing.

Today is hot and humid, as summer is wont to be here in New Jersey. It’s only June, and it feels like early August: muggy enough to make everyone irritable, muggy enough to make you feel like a glazed apple that’s been left in the sun too long, muggy enough to punish any physical activity with a headache. I’ve been riding the edge of one all day. If the long-term forecast is to be believed, we can expect a lot more days just like this, or worse; it’s supposed to be an unusually hot, wet summer.

On days like this, my mind keeps turning to the phrase “the dog days of summer,” like an 8-track that’s been interrupted many times, then left to run, or an iPod set to mix: I can think anything I want in any order, but periodically, I return to rehearsing “the dog days of summer.” A song I can’t really get out of my head.

I’d like to get it out of my head because the phrase never made much sense to me. No, that’s not true. It did make sense to me, once, but I was wrong.

As a little kid, I’d hear the phrase at the height of summer heat, late July to mid-August, and always thought of a hot, panting, thoroughly miserable dog, overheated because it couldn’t take off its fur coat the way humans can. I long figured “the dog days of summer” were so named because it made people feel like dogs, too beaten down by heat to do much of anything but lie in the shade and pant.

I don’t remember when I learned that “the dog days of summer” have nothing to do with actual dogs, but with astronomy, something to do with Sirius (the dog star) and/or canis major (the big dog), the constellation of which Sirius is part, a little below and to the left of Orion.

Which doesn’t make any sense to me, either. Canis major is part of the winter group, so named because it’s visible in the early night-time hours (when people look at the stars) during the winter. As the earth orbits the sun, different parts of the surrounding sky become visible, lying on the other side of the earth from the sun. So for a while, I figured the sun must be passing through canis major at the height of summer, while the summer group—opposite the sun as measured from earth—was visible at night.

But that doesn’t make any sense, either. The sun travels about the ecliptic plane. Technically, the earth orbits in the ecliptic plane, region defined by planetary orbits, which more-or-less lie within a single plane, but from the viewpoint of earth, we sit still and the sun moves about, so in the context of primitive astronomy and folklore, the sun travels the ecliptic. The ecliptic, by no coincidence, comprises the twelve signs of the zodiac; the zodiac is significant precisely because those are the constellations through which the planets (including the zodiacal “planets” of the sun and moon) pass. Canis minor isn’t on that list, and the sun never passes through it. Leo, Cancer, or Gemini, yes, but not the big dog.

Our president continues to hunt for his legacy. No, not his real legacy: an empty treasury, torture, Constitutional violations, a dying ecosystem, an abandonment of the working class, and above all thousands of American deaths and uncounted Iraqi deaths in a pointless and continuing war, fought over a lie. See, the president wants a good legacy. He feels entitled to it, as he has felt entitled to everything else in life. Ronald Reagan has a international goddamn airport named for him, for chrissakes, and he caused a sharp rise in air traffic accidents by firing the air traffic controllers, because the free market has no room for people who want to choose the price at which they sell their skilled labor. And, since Bush the lesser is fantastically talented at ignoring anything he doesn’t want to know, and all we have to report from his presidency is bad, he’s beginning to wonder what he’s been doing for the past eight years. Must have been something; eight years don’t just vanish on you. Well, not unless you’re on a bender, and George is pretty sure the Secret Service would prevent that. Something really good of course, really decider-person-y. Weren’t people hailing him as a hero or something when New York blew up? Oh, that was Rudy. Well, how ‘bout that time I expressed concernitude for that New Orlen City thingie? Oh. Well, why not? But I bet my sudden decision to make Israel and those other guys peaceful worked, right? That’s a real, uh, no other president, this historic, old, peace finally flies again in over the land of our forefathers. Lemme see that speech again.

So the president expects to leave a highly flattering legacy, but he’s having some trouble at figuring out what it is supposed to be.

He’d better come up with something fast, or someone’s going to think one up for him, those who haven’t already decided his legacy is debt, torture, treason, ecological disaster, poverty, and lying to start a pointless war. I’m delighted by this initiative to have a sewage treatment plant renamed after him. This may not be an ideal monument—I rather like the suggestion of a hole in the ground, which we just keep digging—but it’s pretty good.

Naturally, the proposal has some opposition. Most of it comes from local Republicans, who, unable to distinguish between disrespect for the office of the president and disrespect for the tragically inept and immoral individual occupying it, considers the very idea inappropriate, possibly treasonous. Their objections are unimportant—not because they’re wrong (and they are), but because they only account for 15% of the vote in San Francisco county. It’s a very blue dot on the map.

No, the real opposition, the argument that gives me pause, comes from the sewage treatment plant’s manager, who also finds the equation of Bush the lesser with sewage unfair. His plant, after all, serves a useful purpose and functions efficiently. He’s proud of his plant, and offended at the thought of Bush’s name on the sign out front.

You know things are bad when the professional authorities feel sewage is too good to be associated with the president.

Motivated by the recent death of George Carlin, I drifted over to YouTube to watch once again his celebrated “7 words you can’t say on television” routine. A tiny little memorial service just for one. Requiescat in pace, George.

It’s just as funny as it ever was. The observation of the ratio of seven words out of a whopping four hundred thousand, the mock “we’re going to get in trouble” whisper as he notes, “They must really be ba-ad…” The observation that “tits” doesn’t even belong in the same league as “motherfucker” and “cocksucker.” The thought police who fight to cleanse public speech of the seven naughty words portray it as an effort to protect our children, but I wonder. If the FCC can shut down media sources using these words, they could scour away the record of Dick Cheney telling the press to “go fuck yourself,” and John McCain calling his wife a cunt. Keep packing posts with party loyalists, and it’s just a matter of time before the rule is used only to protect those in power.

Which Carlin would have appreciated. His comedy had three major themes: vulgarity for its own sake, words as artifacts of culture, and bringing down the high and mighty and their instruments of control. And the last of these became ever more prominent in his routine as he aged. Carlin took his job as fool seriously. It was from Carlin, not the mainstream media, that I learned Ed Meese was the subject of three separate DoJ investigations on his appointment to attorney general, the nation’s leading law enforcement officer, and that the Reagan administration asserted the power to arrest American citizens if the police simply think you’re going to commit a crime. He nails the current political climate in his recent “You have no rights” routine. But he reserved special attention for religion, perhaps as the result of his Catholic grade school education—no place for a sharp and skeptical intellect. Although he would object to being enshrined as a powerful voice for atheism, he was.

When you watch a YouTube video, the page calls up links to a variety of related videos, a sort of “if you liked this, you’ll probably like…” service. Judging by these selections, it’s Carlin’s anti-authoritarian discourse which will survive. Nobody’s saving his undirected potty-mouth routines at all. His brilliant dissections of the word “stuff” and of the differences between baseball and football get listed, too, but in sheer number of recordings preserved on YouTube, they are swamped by screeds against censorship, neo-imperialist thought, and the sheer weirdness of our concept of God and its employment as a weapon of the far right.

It’s a good legacy to leave behind. The best weapon against tyranny has always been truth. The most effective vehicle for that kind of truth has always been ridicule. Carlin was a master of both.

I’m disappointed at the news out of the Obama camp. Doubly disappointed.

First, he’s reneged on a promise to stick to federal matching funds if his Republican opponent did the same. At the time he made it, the promise must have been easy to make: McCain, who took federal funds only because he desperately needed them right then, was widely considered to be already out of the picture, and the other Republican contenders, used to belonging to the party of big money, showed no intention of doing so. Obama surprised the country, and possibly himself as well, by seizing the nomination, and especially by bringing in as much campaign money as he did. But he did raise well over the limit mandated by matching funds, and McCain wobbled his way through the Huckabee-Romney religious schism to grab the brass ring, so we now learn that Obama didn’t really mean the promise in the first place.

It’s a worrying sign, particularly when Obama himself is largely an unknown. A fine orator, to be sure, and he’s offering lots of attractive promises, but for a political career as short as his, we’re currently taking those promises on faith. Tossing one aside so lightly even before entering office is a bad omen.

The decision may even work to his disadvantage. Obama has raised an unprecedented amount of cash from small donations, easily enough to compensate him for the arm’s-length at which he has held corporate donors. My circle of online friends, inspired by this example, have sent more than their fair share. Now that Obama has proven unwilling to stick to the straight and narrow of campaign finance reform—the reliance on small donors in practice, if not in actual law—they’re rethinking their pledges. If this gusher of funding slows to a trickle out of his (understandable) desire to make his monetary advantage work for him, he loses both the financial sledgehammer and the moral high ground he sacrificed to get it.

Second, Obama’s stated intentions concerning the latest FISA bill are lukewarm at best, and disappointing in the extreme. Instead of using his already substantial political capital to attack a bill that grants federal authorities free use of warrantless wiretaps, and especially the (entirely needless) retroactive grant of immunity to the phone companies which acquiesced to the White House’s unconstitutional requests, Obama has merely pledged to offer an amendment. Not to vote against the measure if his amendment is ignored, mind you, but simply to suggest it be rewritten.

History lesson: the original FISA legislation was written precisely to prevent presidential abuse of authority, forbidding the use of our federal agencies to spy on ordinary citizens, and especially on the political opposition. It arose in the wake of Nixon and the Watergate debacle. Remember Nixon? He didn’t see anything wrong with using the FBI to destroy political enemies. Public, judicially-approved warrants for the new wiretap technology were deemed essential to rein in such abuses. I don’t believe that what we’ve seen out of the White House recently in any way suggests we can now trust presidents only to spy on bad guys. Do you?

If the phone companies did nothing wrong (ha!), they should have no trouble defending their actions in court; otherwise, both private and class action lawsuits—expensive lawsuits—are the surest way to prevent similar criminality in the future. All they had to do was ask for a warrant. Or anything, anything, in writing: when Qwest asked for an official request in print, the request was dropped. And there’s no reason to offer immunity to the phone companies as a means of collecting evidence against the current administration. Such evidence as the telcos have should be subpoenaed immediately. Such evidence as the White House has is being carefully expunged from the record even now, but whatever survives is handily in reach of the next president. Immunity won’t safeguard either.

I don’t know why Obama did not, instead, raise holy hell about FISA. Voters know that Bush and cronies are up to their eyeballs in abuse of authority, and they recognize retroactive immunity for what it is. The bulk of American voters have no great love for large corporations, especially when those corporations are visibly selling out basic constitutional rights. Other Democrats are standing up in righteous indignation, or at least a decent performance of it, and jumping in the polls for it; Obama could win votes by doing the same. Does he hope to use the dangerous reformulation of FISA to his own advantage? Is he beholden to the telcos for some reason, or fearful of their vengeance? Is he simply not yet divorced enough from the whipped dog mentality of the Democratic party generally to think that we as a nation, and he specifically, can stand up to the bastards who have been rewriting constitutional law to their own ends for so long, and punishing anyone who objected on grounds of principle?

I don’t know, nor can we rely on Obama to give a straight answer to the question, if asked. No matter how you cut it, this too is a worrying exhibition of the ritual post-primary, pre-election move to the center from a candidate already in the center. The neocons have been in charge so long, and so dominated the public message, that we’ve forgotten where the center is.

And, for that matter, what’s right.

As the Democratic primary drew to a close, emotions ran high. As it became clear that Clinton, once the unassailable front-runner, would not, in fact, win the nomination, many of her supporters felt cheated: cheated out of seeing their favored candidate, but even more heartbreakingly cheated out of the opportunity to see a woman run as one of our two major party’s nominees. Still wound up over the battle—with a wink-and-nod encouragement from Clinton—and wound up over the loss, many vowed to stay home in November, or even to vote for McCain, just to send a message to the Democrats.

Now that two weeks have passed, passions have cooled, and those vindictive Clinton supporters have begun looking around and deciding that Obama might not be so bad after all, and that promising a protest vote might have been a little hasty. That’s about what I expected; Clinton supporters are mostly decent people, with a reasonably resilient connection to reality. Already, pundits’ worries over “Obama’s problem with Clinton supporters” have proven vacuous; the last report I read showed 62% of Clinton backers favoring Obama, up from 40% shortly after June 3, while those supporting McCain have dropped from 52% to 30%, despite McCain’s attempts to woo them over. In weeks to come, those numbers will shift even further.

Inevitably, there will be some embittered hold-outs, the one-issue voters who measure everything by how it reflects on society’s attitude toward women, who decide that pretty well everything is an affront to women, and who can see no further than the latest insult. In the interests of whittling down the impact of these few, blinded by their own bile, I offer a few reminders.

John McCain is remarried. His first wife waited patiently for him as he was imprisoned in Vietnam. He repaid her loyalty by dumping her after a disfiguring car accident, picking up a blond beauty queen and heiress sixteen years his junior. They married under a prenuptial agreement, ensuring he will not inherit her fortune. Perhaps the suspicion underlying this decision was well-founded. After all, he doesn’t show much respect for her, either, publicly or privately: teased about his hair loss, he reddened and replied, “At least I don’t plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt.” At a press conference. His legislative career holds a rock-solid anti-abortion record, ranging from refusing birth control qualifying for insurance to calling for the reversal of Roe v. Wade. He has voted to define embryos as qualifying for SCHIP medical assistance, but voted against SCHIP benefits for actual walking, breathing children in immediate need. He has voted against paid pregnancy leave, laws forbidding gender discrimination in pay rates, and social programs designed to support single working mothers. But hey, he says he always respected Senator Clinton, and hopes that voters will decide that one dubious little assertion equates to respecting women generally. It doesn’t.

If Obama’s nomination was a slap in the face, then what must we consider a vote for John “you cunt” McCain?

Although I enjoy Daily Kos, I don’t read it regularly. There’s too much rant between the punches that strike home—which is perfectly acceptable in a partisan political blog, just not something I want to have to wade through for the good stuff. Instead I rely on political newsgroups to call the juicier bits to my attention. Kos has an exquisite bullshit detector, and he does his homework, digging through an awful lot of political blather to hold politicians and pundits to their words, so when he scores, he scores big.

My political newsgroup let me down in this case. I discovered this list of quotes instead as part of a Google search for something entirely different, but it’s rewarding to see a blind alley pay off. This page is loaded with what Kos does best: examining the words of our officials, elective or appointive, and exposing the hypocrisies. I won’t waste bandwidth by repeating them all here, but I feel this one deserves special attention, to be repeated as many times as humanly possible:

“"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is.”

Indeed. Fire-eaters may insist on no exit without victory, but it works the other direction, too. Without establishing conditions upon which an exit strategy is to be executed, there is no way to determine when victory has been achieved. And as long as you remain, you're still fighting; as long as you're still fighting, you haven't won. No exit, no victory.

Our country was about to launch a military campaign against a brutal dictator, one known certainly to have driven a genocidal program against his own people, and suspected of trafficking in drugs and weapons-grade nuclear material. The “war” was not officially a war, since Congress had not formally declared one, nor even been consulted by our headstrong president. Naturally, this raised concerns in the opposition, who spoke with one voice against military adventurism. This particular quote came from a young governor, worried that an ill-conceived decision to embroil our military in sectarian conflicts half a world away would hurt our military, not to mention the troops themselves, and that the president was overreaching his constitutional authority.

The conflict was in Kosovo. The speaker was then-Governor George W. Bush (R-TX). If only he'd listened to his own advice before going to Iraq.

This weekend, I failed to avoid eye contact with Roland Straten, Republican congressional hopeful, as I passed him on the sidewalk, and he handed me a brochure. Ordinarily, I’d toss it in the nearest trash can, but there was a line at the ATM, so I had a few minutes with nothing better to do, and I read it.

It was small, no more than 4”x8”, and reads pretty much like a laundry list of Republican talking points: lower taxes, reduced government, keeping America safe, making healthcare “affordable” rather than available. The brochure is a little vague on specifics, which I suppose is only to be expected from a 4” by 8” slip of paper, but there is an irony there, as he claims to offer “effective solutions, and not just rhetoric” to various challenges the nation faces. There is a web address which the interested can consult, but it’s rather shy on specifics, too; all that extra text is expended either on expanding the list of things he’s for—private schools, lower interest rates, fighting on in Iraq, thinking twice before jumping on the global warming bandwagon, a national ID card—or on fluff like equating Democratic programs with communism. To give you an idea of the ‘effective solutions” he is offering, in contrast to “just rhetoric,” consider his bullet-point approach to social security:

“The basic principles that I will follow when asked to make a decision on solution are:
• A long-range solution must be put into place.
• The Elderly are able to retire with financial security and dignity.
• The young are able to keep more of the fruits of their labor.
• In achieving the first two principles, the economy is benefited and not burdened.”

All laudable desires. Not too specific. Indistinguishable, in fact, from “just rhetoric.” The whole web site reads like that. In a bullet point list on the economy, he is for “wise monetary policy.” He is against corruption. He acknowledges a need for limited regulation, but feels “burdensome irrational regulations” hurt the economy. He does not attempt to define which regulations are burdensome and irrational—or indeed identify a single one—he seems to feel it is enough simply to promise to work to do away with them. On other pages, he explains that he is for choice. He is against unreasonable regulations. He is against partisan gridlock. He also refuses to compromise his core principles.

The reason I actually went to his website and found these non-very-detailed details instead of simply blowing the whole thing off is one specific line on the brochure, which made me so curious that I wanted to go and ask him about it in person, only to find he had run off while I was at the ATM. The coward.

The specific line is one of a list of bullet-point rhetorical questions. (Mr. Straten likes bullet points.) It reads:

“Do you feel that running the United States is too important a job to leave to career politicians with no business experience?”

Just mull that over for a minute. The longer you examine it, the stranger it seems. It’s designed to make refusal sound damning, as though answering “no” means you don’t feel the job is important.

Mr. Straten seems to feel, like Calvin Coolige, that the business of America is business, because he doesn’t ask whether we should elect officials with, say, military experience for the times they must make decisions about military affairs, or whether we should elect officials with legal experience for the times they must make decisions about civil liberties, or whether we should elect officials with scientific experience for the times they must make decisions dependent on scientific understanding. No, the proper measure of suitability for public office, in Mr. Straten’s mind, is a business background.

Even if that were true, if national politics really were first, last, and always about business, then career politicians would have business experience. By definition. It would be their career. If professional experience is the way to go in choosing a candidate, then running the United States should be left precisely to the career politicians. That’s what they do, for heaven’s sake.

So what does Mr. Straten’s ideal look like? How would a country governed by businessmen, instead of lawyers and generals and similar professionals ignorant of hierarchical decision-making, operate? Well, that’s open to speculation, but perhaps we could get some kind of indication by looking at the White House. Bush the lesser was the first US president ever with an MBA, and drove several businesses into the ground before being abruptly injected into political life as Texas governor. Cheney came directly from a seat as CEO of Halliburton. Donald Rumsfeld served as CEO of pharmaceutical G. D. Searle & Company, CEO of General Instrument Corporation, and sat on the board of engineering giant Asea Brown Boveri. Beyond that, the Republican party has been generally cozy with big business, and specifically eager to sell favors for campaign donations; to a lesser extent, the Democratic party, insofar as the DLC has its hands on the tiller and in the till, has as well. Their attitudes towards the relationship between business and government have proven disastrous to the nation. Mr. Straten shares those attitudes.

And that’s what I wanted to ask Mr. Straten about, had he not vanished before I got a chance. “This is really the platform you intend to be elected on? Really? That ‘running the United States is too important a job to leave to career politicians with no business experience?’ That businessmen, as exemplified by the current administration, are the best choice to run the country—and, more to the point, what voters want in this election cycle? Wow, man—you’ve got some serious balls.”

We watched Iron Man last week. Eileene insisted; I merely acquiesced. Despite the excitement it generated in the geek world, I had learned from the examples of Spider Man and other great dumps of licensed Marvel material onto the silver screen, and my expectations were rather low. I was not disappointed. Not that the movie didn’t deliver on its promises of popcorn-crunching spectacle, but that it delivered the bare minimum of anything else. If my expectations were low, that’s only fair; the movie sets its own bar rather low as well.

I bring it up not to review the movie as a whole, but to discuss one scene in particular. Shortly after Stark masters the use of his super-powered battle armor, he sees a TV report of a terrorist attack in Afghanistan, armed with his own merchandise. Determined to set things right, he flies there immediately. Unfortunately, he alarms the USAF, who, unable to identify Iron Man as a good guy, chase him around with a couple jets, and even fire missiles at him. This is a bit worrisome. Stark zips off at Mach 2—which we learn from Air Force control room chatter—but it’s not enough. He launches some chaff, but a missile gets past. He weaves around. No dice. The remaining missile explodes just behind him, and Whooooooah he goes into an arm-flailing comic tailspin, propelled forward by the force of the explosion. Boy, that was close.

Hardcore nerdlings have already spotted my objection. Iron Man is zipping through the air at over Mach 2, that is to say, over twice the speed of sound. By definition, this is over twice the maximum speed at which a mechanical wave can pass though a medium, in this case air. That’s what sound is: a mechanical wave passing through a medium. Any faster than that, and the molecules at the edge of the wave get in one another’s way; the moving molecules can’t push any harder on the ones that aren’t yet moving, and the wave collapses in turbulence. The expanding burst of fiery gas wouldn’t suddenly propel Iron Man with a dizzying burst of extra speed because it couldn’t possibly reach him; he’s flying over twice as fast as the burst itself.

Now that’s not meant as a criticism of the movie. Not really. It’s more an observation of the nerd mindset. We generally know about basic scientific and engineering principles like the speed of sound. Often, we know much more arcane technical information as well, like computing times for search algorithms and decay patterns of high-energy bosons, but even the most ignorant nerd can recognize that guards thrown backwards by an exploding prison door will end up on their backs, not face-down as international movie extra body language uses to express the idea that “this minor character is dead,” which also happens in the movie. Nerds get excited about technical details; it’s what gets us up in the morning. We notice details like this, and they irritate us. So it strikes me as odd when a movie like Iron Man, squarely aimed at the geek audience, without the same hope for a more universal appeal like that enjoyed by Star Wars or Lord of the Rings, plays so fast and loose with niggling technical details like explosions at Mach 2. It makes the core audience want to argue.

Occasionally, such argument can work in a show’s favor, as the continuing buzz over the bad physics of Star Trek helps sustain interest through half-baked attempts to rectify the show into a self-consistent whole, and it occasionally generates a bit of extra merchandising revenue, when nerds go out and buy the book which explains it all. But far more often, too much careless physics makes nerds roll their eyes and leave for less “stupid” shows, with a greater reverence for continuity and technical detail.

I had a similar reaction to the latest Indiana Jones flick, a similar formulaic popcorn-cruncher designed to make a few more bucks on a well-branded intellectual property and to test how many more times it could be done. To be fair, the movie was staying true to its pulp magazine and serial film heritage, just as Iron Man is staying true to its often ludicrous comic book roots. (And, also to be fair, I dragged Eileene to the Indiana Jones movie the week before, while she merely acquiesced, because she wanted to see Iron Man. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, I suppose.) But consider just how great Raiders of the Lost Ark was, because it knew when to step back from the stupidly, insultingly implausible devices of pulps and serials, while the rest of the series wasn’t great, because they didn’t.

That’s precisely where Iron Man lies. It’s okay, but never tries to rise above itself, or the dubious quality of its inspirational source material.

We greeted the summer yesterday. At least I did; I can’t swear to what was passing through everyone else’s mind.

Summer woke late this year, held off by a spate of clouds and rain and unseasonable cold, not to mention my personal dislocation for a couple of weeks to attend to affairs in Illinois, during which the sun dodged about in the three-to-five-day window between here and there, keeping me in the chill. When it did arrive, it was with a sudden heat wave, as if angry for having overslept. You know how it is.

But having established her arrival, dame summer’s mood passed. The weather broke just a bit yesterday, and the day was warm instead of hot. I grilled—well, overgrilled—some bratwurst and Italian sausage, and turned out some potato salad, for those who like it. The star of the show was bacon-wrapped pepper thingies, a recipe from the Pioneer Woman’s website. Jehosephat, they were delicious, and you should make some of your own as early as possible, along with many other delicious-looking recipes she offers. I suggest eating them warm, when they are divine; cool, they are merely tasty. Ella was too pressed for time to add fresh-squeezed lemonade, so we made do with cartooned lemonade and tea. Homemade mint chip ice cream for dessert. A hilly ridge lies close on the west side, so the sun sank behind the trees as we chatted and ate our very, very summer dinner. An obliging breeze cleared away the charcoal smoke, and the mosquitoes left us alone.

Here’s to dame summer. She can be a wonderful lady when she’s not feeling bitchy.

Earlier I related Bill Richardson’s anecdote proving that, whatever his virtues and faults, Obama is a mensch. I had that sense reinforced recently, when Eileene called this video clip to my attention. Obama is an inspiring speaker when he needs to be, but I appreciate more that he is a thoughtful speaker when he chooses to be. His strong religious convictions were one of the things I liked least about him, but a speech like this puts me much more at ease: “We are a nation of varying religious beliefs, and it is well that we should be. I am a religious man. But we must not govern by religious conviction, nor will I.” A very different expression from Kennedy’s famous speech reassuring voters that his Catholicism was no threat to American values, and directed against challenges from a very different direction, but the same sentiment—one I hold dear, and spoken in a way that puts me at ease. Obama is a mensch.

Contrast this to Joe Lieberman’s behavior of late. Nominally, he has been a Democrat throughout his career. Nominally. Lieberman doesn’t place much stock in such inconveniences like labels and party and human decency. Before he ran alongside Al Gore on the 2000 democratic ticket, I knew of him mostly for his anti-abortion attitude and his belief that video games are a satanic menace to the souls of the nation’s youth, much more deserving of the Senate’s attention than more urgent, more material threats. That and bringing home the bacon to corporate sponsors. In the 2000 run, Lieberman didn’t contribute much, and seemed almost happy to lose, immediately leaving the election behind to get back to the Senate—remember? Since then, he’s supported military adventurism (It’s okay; they’re only Muslims), smiled upon turning our national security apparatus loose on the citizenry generally, free from distractions like warrants and prohibitions on torture, and fought to defend the imperial presidency, sabotaging any Congressional effort to reinstate accountability. An all-‘round Bush-loving kind of guy.

Toppled by a more properly Democratic challenger in the primary for the 2006 election, he chose to run as an independent, won, and, unrestrained any longer by even a nominal commitment to the Democrats, has become quite the Republican apologist. The Democrats put up with it because they need to maintain their 1-head majority, and certain perks that go with it, but the writing is on the wall. Sensing that he has obliterated the last shred of good will from his former party, and sensing that his career is doomed without Republican support, this “independent” has proven willing to do anything to get it. He’s appeared more visibly beside McCain than any Republican; maybe he’s fishing for a veep role he can believe in. As part of his McCain endorsement, he’s turned to attack Obama. Disturbing in light of