Okay. This is one of those pages that no one is going to comment on, and I accept that, and you should, too. There isn’t going to be anything much worth reading on here, or remarking on, either. So let’s just embrace that fact and move on.

Labor Day.

Throughout the land, people with the day off are gathering with their families for cook outs and quiet (or boisterous) celebrations of the fact that nearly all of them are getting paid to do absolutely not one single fuckin thing today.

Getting paid for doing nothing is a good thing, and when it’s happened to me (rarely, as I’ve mostly worked for temp agencies the last twelve years) I’ve found it attractive and pleasant. However, as Paul wisely notes, our family never does anything for Labor Day, so here I am sitting on my ass typing all this nonsense to you people, at least a few of whom loathe me for utterly specious and invalid reasons.

But most of you just frickin’ adore me, at least, from a safe distance you do as long as it doesn’t cost you any money, so, hey, I’ll type for you on everyone’s day off with pay because I’m just so swell.

There is absolutely nothing going on in my life at all right now, so let’s see just how much we can milk that for.

MY SANITY KNOWS NO BOUNDS

Relentless ego searching on Google reveals that the virus/meme of Happy Little Darren is spreading relentlessly across the Internet. Not only have a lot of my posts to the hated Hayden’s blog Electrolite gradually infiltrated other political blogs, but lately, some excerpts from my email published over at the Pop Culture Gadabout have garnered comments on a few other comic geek blogs, as well. And that’s always nice, although, as Matthew Rossi might sullenly note, it’s not as if anyone is paying me. And I agree with his sullenness in that regard, while noting we are most likely sullen for different reasons.

ALL THE PRETTY HEARSES

There is no real blog or email news. Alli may well be dead for all I know, which would make me sad. The guy at Speedmonkey still refuses to in any way acknowledge me sending him the article he asked for, my editor at Joe Bob Briggs still refuses to send me any free books to review or, for all I know, publish any of my previously finished and submitted reviews, and my Australian editor Jonathan still maintains a truculent silence on the subject of any further remuneration for his e-magazine’s use of my brilliant Barsoomesque pastiche A WARLORD OF ERBEROS. In fact, other than Matthew Rossi communicating to me what an appalling and dreadful waste of space and cellular tissue he feels me to be, and David Fiore writing me and telling me he’s changed his blog URL, the email thing has been a bust lately.

Oh, wait, I’m being an asshole. (Well, that’s nothing new, but still.) A couple of extremely nice people, one named Letitia and the other named Terry, have taken the time to write and tell me how much they enjoyed one of my articles (Letitia my first Heinlein article, Terry my Steve Englehart article). People rarely take the time to do this (although quite a few, over the years, have gone off sulking to various corners of the Internet and called me names on various chat threads without bothering to tell me about it when they read something in one of my articles that they didn’t like about one of their favorite comics pros) and I always really appreciate it when it happens.

It’s odd. If people actually paid to read my stuff, I’m sure I’d get a lot more email about it. But people seem to have a mild contempt for anything they find for free on the Internet, regardless of whether they enjoy it or not. So, thank you Letitia, and thank you Terry, if either or both of you are reading this. You made my day.

Dear little Tuxedo Slack apparently hied his monkeyboy ass off to the Hugo Awards in Canada somewhere, and he’s been posting nothing but award related dribble for the past several days. I’m pleased lovely lad Tuxedo made his meandering, rather addle-pated and always overly earnest way to the Hugo Awards, however, because it simply reinforces that I must Be Strong and never, under any circumstances whatsoever attend any sort of organized geek activity again, at least, as a no name geek my damn self, because people like Tuxedo are entirely the reason why I have never much enjoyed the few cons I have ever been to, and jesus h. christ they hang from the rafters in shrieking hordes and screaming dimwitted slopebrowed droves at these things. It is exactly as if some malevolent cartoon genius cloned several thousand Tuxedo Slacks and then physically deformed each of them with some hyper-etheric mutation ray into various differing but always hideous semblances, after which said deranged science-villain loaded them all into a prototype teleporter and beamed them will-they, nill-they into some hapless and unsuspecting Holiday Inn along with a bemused Neil Gaiman and a bewildered William Shatner.

And he never gives them any deodorant, either.

Tuxedo’s latest blog page informs me that apparently Neil Gaiman’s American Gods won a Hugo last year, which makes me sad, because while I think Neil Gaiman is generally a brilliant writer, American Gods sucked great big donkey dick. Oh yes.

I’d print my American Gods review here, but nobody ever comments on the geek stuff on this blog, and it’s supposed to be up at JoeBobBriggs right now, so if it isn’t, it’s not my fault.

HOW TALL IS KING KONG?

Who wants gum? (I do! I do!)

Let’s see. I watched Brotherhood of the Wolf last week. And I recently watched Caddyshack again for the first time since, I’m thinking, the late 70s. Plus something else… what was it… I don’t know. Oh, yeah, Deep Blue Sea. Also UHF, Millennium, and Freeway. And Jurassic Park III.

So, I noticed on Yahoo this morning that they were reporting…

Oh, you want me to tell you what I thought of the movies? Okay. Hmm:

Brotherhood of the Wolf seemed to badly want to be The Name of the Rose meets Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. There was some interesting historical stuff about the conflict between the King of France and the Catholic Church, but mostly it was very muddled and confused, the characters were all very two dimensional, and all the fight scenes had nothing to do with the plot. So I wasn’t all that impressed.

Deep Blue Sea I’d seen before. It’s not bad… I like my adventure movies like this, unpretentious little B movie thrillers with no major philosophical axe to grind. However, while Deep Blue Sea has a couple of really good moments – Samuel Jackson making the heroic ‘we are not going to die here speech’ and then immediately getting eaten by a shark is just brilliant – it also has a lot of that same really repetitive stuff you get in every underwater thriller… you know, you’ve got the artificial construct that the characters are trapped in, and different sections of it keep flooding, and they have to keep doing the thing where they rush to the airtight doors and turn the cranks and tumble through them and force the door shut again against the onrushing tons of water… and in this movie, at least, they do this over and over again. Plus, there’s superintelligent sharks that want to eat them, and LL Cool J plays a cook who likes to quote from the Bible, so that’s a lot of fun for me, too.

I fast forwarded through a lot of UHF. Weird Al’s humor isn’t a big thing for me. But I did really enjoy “Wheel of Fish”.

Freeway is awful, but you get to see a youngish Reese Witherspoon pouting and gyrating her way through a lot of steamy sexual situations (none of them visually explicit, alas) and an equal number of really psychotically violent bits (the sequence where she gets the drop on Kiefer Sutherland’s scenery chewing serial killer is actually pretty hilarious). Also, there’s a minor role played by a completely unrecognizable Brittany Murphy in this, and I enjoy looking at Brittany Murphy, even when you really can’t tell who she is. So it’s a really dreadful movie… Kiefer’s portrayal of the serial killer is just appalling… but there are moments when it’s fun to watch.

Millennium I remembered being a spectacularly lousy SF movie, and in fact, it achieves that level of badness right around the last ten minutes. Up until that point, though, it’s mediocre to good, with some actually interesting stuff going on in it. When I remember the brilliance of the story Varley adapated into this mess (“Air Raid”, originally published under his ‘Herb Boehm’ psued in IASFM #1 because he had another, much worse, short story under his own name in that issue as well) I’m right back at spectacularly lousy again, but still, if you get a chance to check this out for free, there’s some good stuff in it. It’s really the ending that makes it suck hard.

Jurassic Park III I saw at the theater, and liked it a lot, and watching it again just a few days ago, I liked it just as much. And it allowed me to articulate something clearly for the first time: I like my adventure movies unpretentious. This movie is exactly what I’d want in an adventure film set on an island where crazy scientists have brought dinosaurs back to life… an unassuming, straight forward action story in which interesting characters attempt to accomplish a readily believable and easily discernible goal and interact with each other in an interesting fashion, while dinosaurs keep trying to eat them. Although Sam Neill snarls a few token lines about “this is how you play God”, this film’s heart clearly isn’t in the philosophical bullshit necessary to get an Oscar nod, nor is the movie all about the heart stopping CGI dinosaurs, either, since they already did all that in the first two films. Where Steven Spielberg simply seems to be incapable of making a film that isn’t Important with a Capital I, Joe Johnston does a much nicer job of bringing his admittedly fairly stock characters to life, putting them through some predictable but still exciting emotional paces as they struggle to survive their jurassic ordeal. Johnston gets a lot of help from a very capable cast (Walter Macy, Tea Leoni, the aforementioned Sam Neill) and I personally don’t care if pterodactyls really couldn’t fly like that (as if anyone actually knows, anyway). This movie was as much fun, in its way, as another unpretentious Crichton based adventure flick I love, Congo. This is the only Jurassic Park film I have any interest in owning; the other two are just way too stuck up for me.

Oh, yeah, I saw The Good Girl too. Terrible terrible film crammed with characters nobody could possibly stand doing a lot of really obnoxious nonsense for no good reason whatsoever. And Paul’s friends all had to go out and buy The Two Towers on DVD as soon as it was released, despite the fact that we all knew damned well that the Extended Edition won’t be out until December, when they release Return of the King in the theaters, at which point, they will all dutifully pony up another $30 or so to own THAT, too. Sad but true.

Oh, yeah, and I watched the “She’s a witch!” sequence from Holy Grail this morning, but it was just to kill time with something amusing while I waited for my computer to boot up.

VILE CANARDS AND OTHER PUSILLANIMOUS POULTRY

Okay, I was saying before, it was rather startling to read on Yahoo Sports this morning that, with Michael Vick injured for the next four to six weeks, Brad Johnson will be QBing for the Atlanta Falcons.

This is pretty amazing. I wonder if Shaun King knows? I wonder if Brad knows?

GOD IS AN IRON

I know most of my opinions are really controversial and bizarre, and often offend people. And I’m really going to go out on a limb with this one, and I imagine I’ll freak a lot of you people out when I come out with it, and probably alienate a lot of you, too. You’ll think I’m insane. You’ll think no one could possibly be this insane. You’ll think I must be kidding, and that the joke is in poor taste, but still. I have to say it:

I like DVDs more than I like videotape.

I know, I know, it’s bewildering and deranged, but I just do.

Okay. Look, I know a lot of people… probably most people, in fact… would say the same thing, but they don’t mean it. They’re just saying that. In fact, I’m aware that the vast majority of you out there really truthfully love videotape and hate DVDs and would gladly see every DVD and DVD player in the world smashed and destroyed, if only the clock could be turned back to the early 1990s. You’d just revel in a DVD free world, because you hate the entire idea of a planet redolent with little round silvery discs that not only have, like, movies and TV shows somehow imprinted on them through arcane high tech magic, but that various pranksters can use to blind you with reflected sunlight while you’re driving to work in the morning.

But despite the fact that you all hate them, I just really like DVDs and I wish I had some cool machine to turn all my videotapes into DVDs.

Yeah. That would be awesome.

BITING THE HEADS OFF LIVE CHICKENS

I should mention that Tuxedo Slack printed the Code of the Jedi on his most recent blog page, or one of them. I recognized it because you have to recite it back to the Jedi Masters in Knights of the Republic at one point. But hey, at least I didn’t type it into my blog.

Actually, the Code of the Sith is much cooler.

So Paul and I did his first solo run in my RPG today. He seemed to enjoy it. His character has a Mortal Fear of the Supernatural, so it was kind of funny when he opened this package he’d been trying to deliver to a wizard all day, and found this severed head inside it that was enchanted to answer questions. Paul’s character absolutely freaked out when the head opened its eyes and said “What is your question, my master?” I mean, he screamed like a woman and threw it across the room. It was pretty funny.

Well, okay, you probably had to be there.

And since this is a small apartment it’s probably just as well you weren’t.

Especially some of you.

RULES OF THE ROAD

In one of his many invaluable essays on life in Hollywood, Mark Evanier described his first meeting with legendary TV comic and icon Milton Berle. Upon being introduced to Uncle Miltie and shaking hands with him, Mark, who is a pretty witty guy, blurted out without even thinking about it, “Wow, I didn’t recognize you in men’s clothing”. According to Mark, this soured Uncle Miltie on him from that point forward, because Mark had broken Rule Number One When Hanging With Milton Berle, namely, Never Be Funnier Than Milton Berle.

I’m reminded of that anecdote now.

Recent experiences at Electrolite being pretty much entirely similar if not completely identical to my previous experiences at Uppity-Negro.com and TampaTantrum.com, I thought I’d take the time to extrapolate whatever wisdom there is to find in the whole mess. Here’s The Deal, as far as I can see:

If you want to make friends and influence people when you head out onto the blogging trail, at least, as regards your posting comments on other people’s blogs, you MUST NOT:

Rule E comes mostly out of my experiences with Aaron Hawkin’s Uppity-Negro blog. He gets a lot of female posters and like any of us male geeks would be in that admirable position, he is thoroughly whipped by them. If a new reader comes along and does anything whatsoever to offend the babes on Aaron’s blog, that new reader can expect a cold shoulder from Aaron roughly the size of the Greenland glacier. I don’t really blame Aaron for this; for a male geek, positive female attention is a jewel beyond price, and if I ever had any women posting to my blog who weren’t related to me by marriage, I’d most likely dance and sing like a puppet on a string when they cracked the lash, too.

I should add to this that I’ve learned, from Electrolite, that one Must Not Be Whimsical, Oblique, or Overly Geeky When Posting To A Big Important Political Marketplace of Ideas Type Blog, because those guys just have no time for Theodore Marley Brooks or Cornelus van Lunt references, regardless of how amusing or entertaining you and some others may find them.

Now, I am posting this to point out that while these may be the universal Rules of the Road on other blogs (and as far as I can see, they are, indeed, pretty much universal) you can ignore them here. I don’t care if you:

Oh, and I like geeky references and would just adore whimsical, cleverly elliptical posts to my comment threads, although I suspect I’d get annoyed if someone started posting a whole lot of Harry Potter-speak here, just for one example.

If there is a universal rule on this blog, it is quite simply, Do Not Be A Bigger Asshole Than The Blogger. In fact, if you can avoid it (and most of my small number of regular posters avoid it with style and panache) Don’t Be An Asshole At All. I am quite a big enough asshole myself to supply all the assholiness necessary for any blog, and I will continue to keep this blog well furnished with stupid remarks, doltish mistakes, whiney rationalizations, and defensive recriminations by the ton lot, there can be no doubt. You need bring none of your own asshole nature with you, I have plenty and am always willing to share.

THE INEVITABLE DISCLAIMER

By generally accepted social standards, I'm not a likable guy. I'm not saying that to get cheap reassurances. It's simply the truth. I regard many social conventions in radically different ways than most people do, I have many many controversial opinions, and I tend to state them pretty forthrightly. This is not a formula for popularity in any social continuum I've ever experienced.

In my prior blogs, I took the fairly standard attitude: if you don't like my opinions or my blog, don't read the fucking thing.

Having given that some more thought, though, I'm not going to say that this time around, because I've realized that what this is basically saying is, 'if you don't like what I have to say, tough, I don't want to hear it, don't even bother to tell me, just go away'.

And that's actually a pretty worthless attitude. It's basically saying, 'I don't want to hear anything except unconditional agreement and approval'. And that's nonsense. This is still a free country... for a little while longer, anyway... and if you really feel you just gotta send me a flame, or post one on my comment threads (assuming they actually work, which I cannot in any way guarantee) then by all means, knock yourself out.

Unless your flame is exceptionally cogent, witty, or stylish, though, I will most likely ignore it. You do have a right to say anything you want (although I'm not sure that's a right when you're doing it in my comment threads, but hey, you can certainly send all the emails you want). However, I have an equal right not to read anything I don't feel like reading... and I'm really quick with the delete key... as various angry folks have found in the past, when they decided they just had to do their absolute level best to make me as miserable as possible.

So, if you don't like my opinions, feel free to say so. However, if I find absolutely nothing worthwhile in your commentary, I will almost certainly not respond to it in any way.

Stupidity, ignorance, intolerance... these things are only worth my time and attention if they're entertaining. So unless you can be stupid, ignorant, and/or intolerant with enough wit, style, and/or panache to amuse me... try to be smart, informed, and broad minded when you write me.