In a way I guess I’m lucky that I missed this story earlier in the year. I can only wish I’d continued missing it until after my lunch was digested.

Go ahead and click through. It tells of two 14-year old girls being kicked off a Portland bus for the grievous crime of *gasp! horror!* kissing in public.

Actually, no, the linked story is even worse that, being a follow-up piece detailing the response by members of a mailing list for Portland bus drivers. The bus drivers in general seem to fully support the bigot, and also throw in some choice comments about how homos are ruining America, Portland, and the sacred institution of public transportation. Also, we apparently have a powerful mafia capable of strong-arming the beleaguered Portland bus-drivers’ union.

Between Portland’s public transportation and Kansas City’s Denny’s, it’s been a bad year for same-sex snogging. I would be outraged, but I’m feeling pretty beat-down. At least nobody was beaten, murdered, and burned atop a pile of tires this year, at least so far as I know.

(I got the story from Oh No a WoC PhD, which you should check out. At the very least take a look at her Year in Review.)

I don’t remember what brought it on. A month or so ago a coworker and I were chatting about something terribly trivial, I have no idea what. I shared a perspective on something, she said that would never have occurred to her, and I replied, “Well, that’s because you’re not lazy enough.”

She met my smirk with disdain. “That’s not something I’d be proud of, if I were you.” And I felt small, so very small.

You know how sometimes you’ll say something you think everyone knows and you get shock and revulsion in response? And how you’ll then start questioning whether “what everyone knows” isn’t just a delusion on your part? This was one of those times. I started running through all the conversations with friends I’d had that held laziness to be a good thing in the service of efficiency and innovation, but there was nothing I could boil down to a soundbite of quick defense. I just slunk away into a corner, as I recall.

But catching up on posts at Making Light, I came across this. Not only am I not delusional, I am operating within a gen-yoo-wine Western tradition. Yay me!

The American The Office is every bit as funny as the British original. I now regret having given up on it during its first season.

The first season, see, made the fatal error of directly adapting scripts from the first series of the British The Office, to dire effect. The situations in the original proceed from soul-crushing ennui, Ricky Gervaise’s blithe office manager serving as a counterpoint, which we simply don’t do in America. Adaptations of those scripts kept the jokes, but it didn’t have the life-at-dead-ends core to hang them on. The exercise struck me as a pathetic imitation, and I turned it off.

Watching again recently, inspired by the critical praise, I was very pleasantly surprised. The American creators figured out how to present their characters as American-TV-style losers, and with the blue tinge this provides the funny bits became often uproarious. The series isn’t as brilliant as the original, lacking genuine bleakness at its center, but it’s turned out to be every bit as humorous.

Why do you suppose Americans are so loathe to admit that many lives end up wasted, pathetic, and hopeless? It’s not something that’s immediately apparent, but when looking at adaptations of shows from abroad it becomes a recurring theme. This is exactly what scuttled the attempts to create American Red Dwarf pilots: in every case, Lister transitioned from a shiftless layabout to some sort of comedic rogue. Blech.

Roseanne made it work, as did Sanford and Son to an extent. Seinfeld tried, I think, but it couldn’t resist giving ludicrously good breaks to its characters, as well as allowing them an unlimited supply of pocket money. Where else has this been pulled off successfully?

ETA: While the Burton adaptation of Sweeney Todd ended up being a decent film in its own right, about which more later, this is partially the thing making it a lesser shadow of the stage production. The film is about a group of disturbed individuals; the stage show is about a disturbed world

You know, the stylus-and-pad doohickeys that allow you to create and edit graphics with pen instead of a mouse. I’d kind of like one, but I suspect it’s the sort of thing where anything less than professional-grade equipment would be a two-day novelty of little actual use.

The Wacom Bamboo is very affordable, but it’s also the lowest-end available. I really don’t want to waste sixty bucks if it’s just a toy, but I can’t really justify the $250 or so that a step up runs.

So, anybody know anything about this stuff?

How about a good old-fashioned sigil charging?

Your orgone and what-not is greatly appreciated.

So Whoopi and the shrill Italian woman and the other black woman were talking with Trisha Yearwood about the differences between living in the South and living in New York, and one of the things that cocked my eyebrow was the notion that in NYC it’s common conversation fodder to discuss how much you paid for things, implicitly competing to see who got it cheapest, while Yearwood maintained that in the South such talk about spending habits is considered rude beyond the pale.

I can only say that Trisha Yearwood has apparently spent her adulthood among people in the Yuppie classes, among whom I’ve found that money discussions are sniffed at, since among my Southern friends and family the exact same “who gets it, and how can I get it, cheapest?” discussion is a conversation staple. It may be interesting to note that as one moves down the socio-economic scale, the competitive aspect becomes more pronounced.

Oh, and Whoopi Goldberg still rocks. Damn, but she’s funny and charismatic and sharp. I’ve also always thought she was beautiful, but I gather I’m in the minority view on that.

So a dipwad pundit name of Jonah Goldberg has a book coming out next month, an opus titled Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning.

No joke. Look it up on Amazon if you don’t believe me. Yes, he’s claiming to be serious.

So the good people over at Sadly, No! have gotten their grubbies on an advance copy and are doing a nice little evisceration. Yay them.

I was just reading along, getting mildly angry and tummy-ached over Goldberg’s words, until I came to the bit considered in this post. This is the bit where Goldberg basically says, “OK, real fascism is nothing like this ‘liberal fascism’ stuff I’ve pulled out of my ass, and that only strengthens my thesis that liberals are the true heirs to real fascism.”

No joke. Go read the quote if you don’t believe me. Yes, he expects you to take him seriously.

Then I started reading the comments on the post, where a scan of that complete page is provided. This longer section reveals the following quote from Goldberg:

And in America, where hostility to big government is central to the national character….

OK. Breathing deeply now. I don’t think anybody reading this knows me well enough to be familiar with one of my more peculiar tendencies. Whenever I come across something that strikes me as incredibly, inexplicably, inconceivably wrong, I literally cannot sit still. If alone or with close friends, I jump up, begin stalking around the room, and furiously compose insult-laden rebuttals to the wrongness I just encountered. I fret and froth and become generally ill-tempered. Sometimes I even shake my fists.

No, really.

So I finally settled down after reading that, and I just wanted to share.

Now, not all of you share my interest in political theory and comparative government and such, so you might not immediately realize why that Goldberg quote set me off. Here’s the deal: Fascism is a tricky critter. It’s hard to define because it is a bottom-up ideology, deriving not directly from the works of any political philosophers or theorists but instead emerging from a collision of “common sense” ideas.

One of these “common sense” ideas that is necessary for a fascist state to emerge is the belief in a monolithic national character. “This is what Freedonia is” leads ineluctably to “This is what a Freedonian is” which implies “Those guys are not true Freedonians” which, when the chips are way down, blossoms into “In order to return to the great and good glory that was the Freedonia of our youth, we must kick those interlopers’ asses.”

I could go on for quite a while, but I’ll stop now. I’m sure it’s clear now why I got pig-spitting mad when Goldberg tried to back up his argument that his ideological opponents are fascists by appealing to “national character”.

Feh.

After giving it a couple of listens, I’m sure it will be a good-looking film.

Johnny Depp can actually sing. This is not high praise, mind you, nor actually any sort of praise at all. It simply means he has something of a voice, can hit the requisite notes, and can maintain the appropriate pitch. Johnny Depp can sing just like the top American Idol contestants can sing: technically competent, offensive in its studied inoffensiveness, and with every scrap of passion scraped out and replaced by generic tics meant to signify appropriate emotions.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Depp’s vocal performance is something so blatant that I pegged it on my first listen: When preparing his vocal performance, the actor seems to have considered each phrase in isolation, as a thing in itself and removed from the whole of the song and way, way removed from what might be considered a consistant and meaningful whole of a role. Because of this, his performance within each song staggers around inchoately, giving eight or nine interpretations within each piece but failing to provide anything meaningful overall.

At least his accent is well-done. Or, rather, his accents are well-done, for he switches randomly between two. At times he does a rather accomplished Cockney, sounding just like a young Michael Caine. At other times, and for no apparent reason, he switches over to the plummy, refined tone that always reminds me of Sebastian Cabot. At least he does them both well.

The same cannot be said of Helen Bonham Carter, whose attempt at Cockney is deplorable. Her accent sounds like she adamantly refused to do a typical cartoonish accent but had only actually ever heard those caricatures. What we get, then, is an arbitrarily toned down and subdued cartoon. Ugh.

But can she sing? No. Not even in the American Idol style. Hell, not even in the drunken karaoke style. The ProTunes is laid so heavily onto her tracks that at times she sounds like she’s standing inside a grain silo, her voice massaged and stretched and tweaked until it develops a tinny echo. And she still sounds like shit.

Worst of all is that the production’s heart isn’t even in the right place. The major stage productions have realized that Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd is a Grand Guignol melodrama. The show is driven by the characters’ overheated emotions and their willingness to engage in deeds most sinister with the barest provocation. The show is operatic, all grand gestures and oversized characterization. Most of all, it is suffused with a black-hearted sense of fun–the audience should give a morbid grin at the fact that the two leads end Act One by concocting a business plan that revolves around murdering random strangers and grinding them into meat pies.

The snippets of dialog present on the soundtrack suggest that Burton, god knows why, decides to play everything as straight as possible. Bonham Carter’s Mrs. Lovett is neither Angela Lansbury’s saucy wench nor Patti Lupone’s calculating slattern; she’s just a woman who finds an untapped market to revitalize her failing business. Likewise, Depp’s Todd is not the familiar cypher animated by vengeful rage but is instead some guy moping over his bad luck.

The chorus’s recurring “Ballad of Sweeney Todd” pieces, which not only give the show structure but also do a lot to create and maintain its cheerfully macabre tone, appear to have been eliminated altogether. Burton appears to have done everything he could to make the narrative as “naturalistic” as possible, much to the work’s detriment.

Of course, they’ll still be getting my ten bucks on or around Christmas Day. Because I’m a sucker, see.

OK, so it’s standard for the difficulty of a game to increase as gameplay progresses. This is not only fine, it’s necessary. It keeps the game interesting by maintaining a level of challenge for the player as sie becomes more familiar with the controls and environment and as hir character levels up and gains more powerful goodies. I have no problem with that, none at all.

But in some games, the difficulty/experience curve is not the nearly-straight line with an average slope of 1 that should, I think, be optimal but is instead a similar line occasionally broken by massive increases in difficulty without a commensurate increase in experience.

You know the kind of plateaus I mean: You’re playing along, having a good old time, really getting into the game, and then BOOM! you hit a level that completely reduces you to molten slag. You try again, and still you end up dead on the ground without coming close to achieving that stage’s goal. You consult the walkthroughs and cheat guides to see if there’s some subtle secret you’re missing, but you find that you’re just supposed to slog through. And you try and try and try again, but you never get closer to the goal without being reduced to virtual corpsehood.

I’m currently playing, or at least attempting to play, Zelda: Twilight Kingdom. I’ve gotten to the bit where apparently I’m supposed to chase down a goblin chief on horseback whilst being chased and assaulted myself by goblin minions. It is the polar opposite of fun, and I’m just about ready to give up. The goblin chief is hard enough to pull up alongside, what with his fancy riding and speedy horse, but his minions muddle up the field and sap your strength to the extent that it’s (at least for me) practically impossible to succeed.

Why do they do this? What is the point, what do you want the players to get out of such roadblocks? It certainly doesn’t add to my enjoyment of the game, especially since I often end up just abandoning the quest and never returning and never buying any of the sequels.

Seriously, why? Anybody have any ideas?

Reading this review, I discovered that the man who directed the take-no-prisoners anti-Murdoch documentary Outfoxed is also responsible for disco cheesefest Xanadu.

There are no words.