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I've been wanting to write up my thoughts on the new TV season for a while and it's always been the last thing on a list of six things I needed/wanted to do, which is why I never got around to it. Today, I put it at the top of the list and Shazam! here I am, writing up my thoughts on the new TV season.
Last year this time I was in Ireland and consuming all my TV via the miracle of Flash Video, including new shows like CHUCK, PUSHING DAISIES, LIFE, PRIVATE PRACTICE, BIONIC WOMAN and BURN NOTICE; and old standbys like GREY'S ANATOMY, UGLY BETTY, DEXTER and FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS.
I was greatly enjoying CHUCK, PD and LIFE. BIONIC WOMAN was cancelled for lo, it was bad and the new show-runner wrote Katee Sackhoff's bad/anti-hero cyborg Sarah Corvus out of the show, which removed any sane person's reason for watching. GA was deep in the suck – the characters unrecognizable from the show's second-season high-water mark, the plots stupid beyond words as the show drifted from its "life and times of surgeon trainees" into bad melodrama land – UB was starting to flounder – really, who wants to watch their eponymous heroine torn between her conscience and her soon-to-be-someone else'-baby-daddy boyfriend? – and FNL was showing everyone why you don't mess with what works. But 30R was a solid weekly half-hour of glee, DEXTER was giving a seminar on anti-heroes and how to write them and L&O: SVU, while not groundbreaking in anyway, was reliably entertaining, if grim.
Then November and the writer's strike (fomented by the AMPTP in a deliberate attempt at union-breaking, which may end up backfiring on the producers in the long-run as the abrupt implosion of the US economy this fall chokes off the supply of hedge-fund money that was paying for a large chunk of studio excesses at a point when Hollywood, still arguing with SAG, has very little product in the pipeline), which lasted four months and shut down production on all series TV on the US networks as the productions ran out of scripts.
TERMINATOR: THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES started in January. By March, I had totally lost my mind for it. Then it came back and… I'm all suspicious and unsure that it can/will tell the story I want it to again, which is a problem that's entirely about my expectations and not the show itself, which is good (which is a post of it own).
The writer's strike ended (yay!), I moved back to Canada (boo!) and Fall TV started up in September, just in time for my post-MA brain slump (uh, Brain, please come back, I need you).
So, of the shows I was watching last fall, I've kicked CHUCK and PUSHING DAISIES to the curb. PD, like any confection is good in small portions but too much leaves me feeling sick to my stomach. While Chi McBride and Kristen Chenoweth are delightful, I found myself increasingly irritated by Chuck and Ned and the repetitiveness of their interaction due to the dramatic untenability of the central premise that they a) are deeply in love and b) can never touch. Status: dropped before the season began.
CHUCK, I was looking forward to, although not its timeslot directly opposite SARAH CONNOR. If forced to choose, girls rule, boys drool and, since SPACE airs CHUCK Thursdays at 10, I figured I could catch up later in the week. Then a funny thing happened – eight minutes into the first episode of the season, I flipped the channel to BBC World News and never flipped back. While action-comedy isn't totally to my taste, I enjoyed the first season of CHUCK and was happy to see it renewed but, more than any other show, CHUCK benefited from restricted options – with 157 channels to choose from (plus the breadth of the TPL and Roger's Video), CHUCK's just one more nerd fantasy about getting the prettiest girl in school. There's nothing wrong with that but it's a story I've seen over and over and over again and, frankly, it bores me. I'm also faintly miffed that it's always a boy nerd/loser with the hot girl – whether it's KNOCKED UP or THE OC – and never a girl nerd with a hot guy. Of course, since female audiences are used to identifying with male characters (or we'd have practically no one to identify with at all) there's no benefit to producers in trying to stretch the genre by making a distaff version when they can get boys and girls to root for characters like Chuck. In the meantime, however, I'll pass thanks. Status: kicked to the curb.
PRIVATE PRACTIVE was pretty dumb from the get go but enjoyably and forgettably dumb. So forgettable that I forgot to tune in again until last week and… it was still enjoyably dumb. Nice work from guest star Leslie Hope (you go, homegirl!) and the kid who played her son but I couldn't care less about any of the main characters so… Status: if I'm watching this, I almost certainly should be doing something else.
Of all the shows I watched last season, I loved LIFE most after TSCC. It had so much going for it – unique concept, interesting writing, awesome production values (let's hear it for the music supervisor), a brilliant performances from Damian Lewis (who should be cloned so we could all have one) and strong supporting work from Sarah Shahi, Adam Arkin and Robin Weigert. If Dani Reese was in many ways a character we'd seen before (broody, issue-ridden, substance-abusing female cop/fighter pilot/doctor), her family connection to the central mystery and her tenuous position on the force as a recovering drug-addict gave the trope some meaningful context. Then came the writer's strike, a skin-of-their-teeth renewal, the loss (either mandated or a result of the layoff) of Robin Weigert, a sexed-up, better adjusted Dani Reese and a general diminishment of the central mystery of who set up Charlie Crews and why. After four episodes, LIFE was down two-strikes having fouled off the sexed-up Dani Reese and the "oh, isn't sexual harassment fun" storyline with new division commander Donal Logue, when they brought in Robin Weigert for a guest shot and scored a base hit. Then last week, Crews paused to tell Reese she needed to button up her shirt before going into a halfway house for recently released cons as if a) he and Reese hadn't visited jails/unpleasant men/rough places before b) a cop needs to be told how to approach ex-cons c) a female cop needs to be reminded that people don't take her as seriously as her male counterparts. It was a moment so egregiously OOC and sexist, I broke up with the show on the spot. Status: sorry, baby, it's not me, it's you (but we'll always have season one).
As for BURN NOTICE, I keep thinking I'll love this show and I keep watching a single episode and forgetting to watch the rest. I keep meaning to come back to it on DVD but something just keeps me from getting around to it. It may, in fact, be Bruce Campbell, who's cult status I find very fourth wall unfriendly on a weekly basis. Or Gabrielle Anwar's "wasn't it so much more fun when I was with the IRA" character that I find distasteful on an almost subconscious level. Status: on hold (again).
As for returning shows, GREY'S ANATOMY actually managed to redeem itself by the end of last season. Or at least render itself watchable again – putting Vorenus in a uniform for the first episode definitely helped. Status: DVR-worthy guilty pleasure.
Sadly, the bloom is off the UGLY BETTY rose. American Ferrera is still made of awesome but stolen sperm, evil spawn, Lindsay Lohan… these are not the things that the UGLY BETTY I knew as made of – the UGLY BETTY I knew was an awesome modern gloss on, well, Jane Eyre, really, where Betty's innate goodness and her fidelity to her beliefs wins the day. The increasingly melodramatic shenanigans of the MODE crowd has unbalanced the show and I no longer feel the love. Status: maybe I'll watch if I'm cooking at 8 on a Thursday night (my mum has a kitchen TV, sad but true).
OTOH, FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS seems to have regained its mojo by refocusing in on character instead of imposed plots. Coach, Principle Mrs. Coach, Saracen, Riggs, Smash, Tyra are back on form. Looks like a winning season for FNL after they stumbled badly last year. Status: I'm watching each week – just don't ask how.
Then there's DEXTER, which was really intense last season and did a brilliant job of building a compelling story around an anti-hero (someone you shouldn't root for but do anyway – Han Solo? Not an anti-hero), but I find bores me this season. How many times can we see Dexter get close to being caught before it gets redundant? It seems the answer is twice. Status: flagged to catch up with on DVD.
Meanwhile, there's not much new this season that I've really liked: FRINGE lost me after the pilot – dude, if characters don't care about the planeful of DEAD people, there's really no reason for me to invest in the diagesis either. Status: kill it with fire.
I did check out THE MENTALIST and while it's not bad, Simon Baker's character verges on awash in emo-manpain for which I have no patience. OTOH, the supporting cast is interesting. But I remember almost nothing from the episode I saw on Tuesday except for Simon Baker's pretty eyes and Robin Tunney's wan irritation with Baker's character. Status: seriously, dude, I should read a book instead.
Finally, I've been watching MAD MEN, mostly because there's not a lot on Sunday nights that I watch. I think New York Magazine's Vulture blog nails the secret of MAD MEN's appeal (and ultimately, why it's most popular with TV critics): At times, Mad Men has seemed like a walking catalogue of mid-century American fears: women in the workplace, media manipulation, alcoholism, rape, abortion, race, and homosexuality, for starters. As such, it's depicted a culture that suffers from a kind of panophobia — a fear of all things — probably because everyone has become so unmoored from any traditional sense of security.
Which also describes the current undercurrent of North American culture, if you hadn't gotten that already. Like FNL (and, in a way, TSCC), shows that most accurately pinpoint America's insecurities tend to be most widely rejected by American audiences.
SpoilerTV has a video with MAD MEN's cast.
The Guardian has a gallery of Dave Gibbons' preliminary WATCHMEN sketches (no giant squid, though).
The Guardian on costume drama season in the UK.
Werewolves vs. Vikings – could be cool, could really suck.
I don't read Ms. Marvel – I don't really read super hero comics any more – even my CAPTAIN AMERICA habit has more to do with the books "spies in capes" conceit than actual super-heroics but this post from Newsarama about the most recent issue of MS. MARVEL brings up a point that I come back to frequently – as a storyteller, you have a responsibility to use discretion and good judgement when writing about real-world events or writing stories inspired by them: that people are tortured in the real world doesn’t justify graphically depicting the torture of a fictional character. Why? Because – particularly in visual mediums such as TV, film and comics – the line between realism and titillation is perilously thin. Further, novels, TV, movies, comics are primarily (but not always) created and consumed as entertainment, not as vehicles for social change or for education – the torture scene you write is going to form part of a story that someone will consume for pleasure – violence as part of the dramatic action of the story is one thing, violence – particularly in the form of torture – depicted for entertainment is another. Finally, stories are created – they are not the real world, they are a result of deliberate choices made by the storyteller and the storyteller therefore is responsible for the end result. Frankly, the argument, "well, that's what would have happened in real life" is not good enough when if comes to presenting the degradation of a character for entertainment (take all my bitching about how comic book routinely present the abuse and degradation and overt sexualized objectification of female characters as entertainment as read for this post, eh?).
Also on comics, prices are going to go up, especially in Canada, where the dollar looks positioned to take a 30-cent hit going into November. Since publishers (comic book, magazine, book) were unpardonably tardy to change their pricing to reflect the near-par between the Canadian and US dollar over the past 18 months, most comic book stores in Toronto have been offering either steep discounts or selling comics at US cover prices (which does make you wonder just what the newsstand mark-up on comics is) for the past two years. A sliding Canadian dollar is going to increase costs for retailers in a marketplace that already operates on thin margins. I'll be watching to see which way the market jumps in Toronto: comics are easily the most discretionary item on my entertainment budget. There's nothing out there that's worth the $2.99 - $5 per issue publishers are charging, not even the new series from Terry Moore (Echo) and Jeff Smith (Rasl).
They've released a collection of Ted Hughes' letters. Hughes' poetry is the work which most directly influenced my own, so I should probably read them. After I read the roomful of stuff I already have…
NPR gives my favourite spy some love – no, not James Bond, although I do find Daniel Craig delicious, Tara Chace
Worth Repeating: Sarah Vowel on Puritans, American exceptionalism and the US presidential race:
Q Your new book has come out just ahead of the U.S. election. Did you imagine it as a talking point in that context?
A Honestly, the book took about a year longer to write it than I thought it would, so no. But there were some current events-y reasons for writing the book, including the Iraq War as an example of American exceptionalism. And a lot of it was just my way of working through my terror of religious fanaticism after the terrorist attacks of 2001. It was cathartic writing about the homegrown religious fanatics of New England at a time when it seems like the whole world is awash in religious fanatics.
Q Who more closely resembles the Puritan founders, Barack Obama or John McCain?
A Obama talks about American exceptionalism and ... the responsibility in that. So he reminds me more of Winthrop than McCain does. Obama went to Harvard, the college that was founded by the Massachusetts Bay colonists, so he also has that whiff of New England about him: the bookish bent, the rhetoric and the oratory.
Q. And even Obama can't run for president without publicly asserting America's superiority.
A No, it wouldn't fly. It's a convention in American politics that you can't not say we're the greatest country on Earth. It's a difficult thing to live up to. And we frequently don't. So it tends to make us look hypocritical.
Uh, yeah, pretty much.
Also from NPR: the collapse of DC's MINX line and how the major publishers are getting "comics for girls" wrong (mostly by taking that approach to the marketplace).
The historian in me thinks this can't possibly end well.
On the road with Snow Patrol - note to self, check concert listings.
Read the awesomeness for yourself.
Civic Remembrance Day ceremonies in Toronto.
There will probably be one at the Veteran's Memorial at QP, too.
It was very strange being in Ireland last year over Remembrance Day. The Republic is still in some denial about Ireland's participation in WWI and the Free State officially sat out WWII, so no celebration of Remembrance Day. I was actually in Cambridge on the 11th, so although I missed the celebration, I got my poppy.
Michael Sleazak has announced that he's broken up with FRINGE and TRUE BLOOD
And MSN has broken up with BSG for SARAH CONNOR - ITA.
Last year this time I was in Ireland and consuming all my TV via the miracle of Flash Video, including new shows like CHUCK, PUSHING DAISIES, LIFE, PRIVATE PRACTICE, BIONIC WOMAN and BURN NOTICE; and old standbys like GREY'S ANATOMY, UGLY BETTY, DEXTER and FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS.
I was greatly enjoying CHUCK, PD and LIFE. BIONIC WOMAN was cancelled for lo, it was bad and the new show-runner wrote Katee Sackhoff's bad/anti-hero cyborg Sarah Corvus out of the show, which removed any sane person's reason for watching. GA was deep in the suck – the characters unrecognizable from the show's second-season high-water mark, the plots stupid beyond words as the show drifted from its "life and times of surgeon trainees" into bad melodrama land – UB was starting to flounder – really, who wants to watch their eponymous heroine torn between her conscience and her soon-to-be-someone else'-baby-daddy boyfriend? – and FNL was showing everyone why you don't mess with what works. But 30R was a solid weekly half-hour of glee, DEXTER was giving a seminar on anti-heroes and how to write them and L&O: SVU, while not groundbreaking in anyway, was reliably entertaining, if grim.
Then November and the writer's strike (fomented by the AMPTP in a deliberate attempt at union-breaking, which may end up backfiring on the producers in the long-run as the abrupt implosion of the US economy this fall chokes off the supply of hedge-fund money that was paying for a large chunk of studio excesses at a point when Hollywood, still arguing with SAG, has very little product in the pipeline), which lasted four months and shut down production on all series TV on the US networks as the productions ran out of scripts.
TERMINATOR: THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES started in January. By March, I had totally lost my mind for it. Then it came back and… I'm all suspicious and unsure that it can/will tell the story I want it to again, which is a problem that's entirely about my expectations and not the show itself, which is good (which is a post of it own).
The writer's strike ended (yay!), I moved back to Canada (boo!) and Fall TV started up in September, just in time for my post-MA brain slump (uh, Brain, please come back, I need you).
So, of the shows I was watching last fall, I've kicked CHUCK and PUSHING DAISIES to the curb. PD, like any confection is good in small portions but too much leaves me feeling sick to my stomach. While Chi McBride and Kristen Chenoweth are delightful, I found myself increasingly irritated by Chuck and Ned and the repetitiveness of their interaction due to the dramatic untenability of the central premise that they a) are deeply in love and b) can never touch. Status: dropped before the season began.
CHUCK, I was looking forward to, although not its timeslot directly opposite SARAH CONNOR. If forced to choose, girls rule, boys drool and, since SPACE airs CHUCK Thursdays at 10, I figured I could catch up later in the week. Then a funny thing happened – eight minutes into the first episode of the season, I flipped the channel to BBC World News and never flipped back. While action-comedy isn't totally to my taste, I enjoyed the first season of CHUCK and was happy to see it renewed but, more than any other show, CHUCK benefited from restricted options – with 157 channels to choose from (plus the breadth of the TPL and Roger's Video), CHUCK's just one more nerd fantasy about getting the prettiest girl in school. There's nothing wrong with that but it's a story I've seen over and over and over again and, frankly, it bores me. I'm also faintly miffed that it's always a boy nerd/loser with the hot girl – whether it's KNOCKED UP or THE OC – and never a girl nerd with a hot guy. Of course, since female audiences are used to identifying with male characters (or we'd have practically no one to identify with at all) there's no benefit to producers in trying to stretch the genre by making a distaff version when they can get boys and girls to root for characters like Chuck. In the meantime, however, I'll pass thanks. Status: kicked to the curb.
PRIVATE PRACTIVE was pretty dumb from the get go but enjoyably and forgettably dumb. So forgettable that I forgot to tune in again until last week and… it was still enjoyably dumb. Nice work from guest star Leslie Hope (you go, homegirl!) and the kid who played her son but I couldn't care less about any of the main characters so… Status: if I'm watching this, I almost certainly should be doing something else.
Of all the shows I watched last season, I loved LIFE most after TSCC. It had so much going for it – unique concept, interesting writing, awesome production values (let's hear it for the music supervisor), a brilliant performances from Damian Lewis (who should be cloned so we could all have one) and strong supporting work from Sarah Shahi, Adam Arkin and Robin Weigert. If Dani Reese was in many ways a character we'd seen before (broody, issue-ridden, substance-abusing female cop/fighter pilot/doctor), her family connection to the central mystery and her tenuous position on the force as a recovering drug-addict gave the trope some meaningful context. Then came the writer's strike, a skin-of-their-teeth renewal, the loss (either mandated or a result of the layoff) of Robin Weigert, a sexed-up, better adjusted Dani Reese and a general diminishment of the central mystery of who set up Charlie Crews and why. After four episodes, LIFE was down two-strikes having fouled off the sexed-up Dani Reese and the "oh, isn't sexual harassment fun" storyline with new division commander Donal Logue, when they brought in Robin Weigert for a guest shot and scored a base hit. Then last week, Crews paused to tell Reese she needed to button up her shirt before going into a halfway house for recently released cons as if a) he and Reese hadn't visited jails/unpleasant men/rough places before b) a cop needs to be told how to approach ex-cons c) a female cop needs to be reminded that people don't take her as seriously as her male counterparts. It was a moment so egregiously OOC and sexist, I broke up with the show on the spot. Status: sorry, baby, it's not me, it's you (but we'll always have season one).
As for BURN NOTICE, I keep thinking I'll love this show and I keep watching a single episode and forgetting to watch the rest. I keep meaning to come back to it on DVD but something just keeps me from getting around to it. It may, in fact, be Bruce Campbell, who's cult status I find very fourth wall unfriendly on a weekly basis. Or Gabrielle Anwar's "wasn't it so much more fun when I was with the IRA" character that I find distasteful on an almost subconscious level. Status: on hold (again).
As for returning shows, GREY'S ANATOMY actually managed to redeem itself by the end of last season. Or at least render itself watchable again – putting Vorenus in a uniform for the first episode definitely helped. Status: DVR-worthy guilty pleasure.
Sadly, the bloom is off the UGLY BETTY rose. American Ferrera is still made of awesome but stolen sperm, evil spawn, Lindsay Lohan… these are not the things that the UGLY BETTY I knew as made of – the UGLY BETTY I knew was an awesome modern gloss on, well, Jane Eyre, really, where Betty's innate goodness and her fidelity to her beliefs wins the day. The increasingly melodramatic shenanigans of the MODE crowd has unbalanced the show and I no longer feel the love. Status: maybe I'll watch if I'm cooking at 8 on a Thursday night (my mum has a kitchen TV, sad but true).
OTOH, FRIDAY NIGHT LIGHTS seems to have regained its mojo by refocusing in on character instead of imposed plots. Coach, Principle Mrs. Coach, Saracen, Riggs, Smash, Tyra are back on form. Looks like a winning season for FNL after they stumbled badly last year. Status: I'm watching each week – just don't ask how.
Then there's DEXTER, which was really intense last season and did a brilliant job of building a compelling story around an anti-hero (someone you shouldn't root for but do anyway – Han Solo? Not an anti-hero), but I find bores me this season. How many times can we see Dexter get close to being caught before it gets redundant? It seems the answer is twice. Status: flagged to catch up with on DVD.
Meanwhile, there's not much new this season that I've really liked: FRINGE lost me after the pilot – dude, if characters don't care about the planeful of DEAD people, there's really no reason for me to invest in the diagesis either. Status: kill it with fire.
I did check out THE MENTALIST and while it's not bad, Simon Baker's character verges on awash in emo-manpain for which I have no patience. OTOH, the supporting cast is interesting. But I remember almost nothing from the episode I saw on Tuesday except for Simon Baker's pretty eyes and Robin Tunney's wan irritation with Baker's character. Status: seriously, dude, I should read a book instead.
Finally, I've been watching MAD MEN, mostly because there's not a lot on Sunday nights that I watch. I think New York Magazine's Vulture blog nails the secret of MAD MEN's appeal (and ultimately, why it's most popular with TV critics): At times, Mad Men has seemed like a walking catalogue of mid-century American fears: women in the workplace, media manipulation, alcoholism, rape, abortion, race, and homosexuality, for starters. As such, it's depicted a culture that suffers from a kind of panophobia — a fear of all things — probably because everyone has become so unmoored from any traditional sense of security.
Which also describes the current undercurrent of North American culture, if you hadn't gotten that already. Like FNL (and, in a way, TSCC), shows that most accurately pinpoint America's insecurities tend to be most widely rejected by American audiences.
SpoilerTV has a video with MAD MEN's cast.
The Guardian has a gallery of Dave Gibbons' preliminary WATCHMEN sketches (no giant squid, though).
The Guardian on costume drama season in the UK.
Werewolves vs. Vikings – could be cool, could really suck.
I don't read Ms. Marvel – I don't really read super hero comics any more – even my CAPTAIN AMERICA habit has more to do with the books "spies in capes" conceit than actual super-heroics but this post from Newsarama about the most recent issue of MS. MARVEL brings up a point that I come back to frequently – as a storyteller, you have a responsibility to use discretion and good judgement when writing about real-world events or writing stories inspired by them: that people are tortured in the real world doesn’t justify graphically depicting the torture of a fictional character. Why? Because – particularly in visual mediums such as TV, film and comics – the line between realism and titillation is perilously thin. Further, novels, TV, movies, comics are primarily (but not always) created and consumed as entertainment, not as vehicles for social change or for education – the torture scene you write is going to form part of a story that someone will consume for pleasure – violence as part of the dramatic action of the story is one thing, violence – particularly in the form of torture – depicted for entertainment is another. Finally, stories are created – they are not the real world, they are a result of deliberate choices made by the storyteller and the storyteller therefore is responsible for the end result. Frankly, the argument, "well, that's what would have happened in real life" is not good enough when if comes to presenting the degradation of a character for entertainment (take all my bitching about how comic book routinely present the abuse and degradation and overt sexualized objectification of female characters as entertainment as read for this post, eh?).
Also on comics, prices are going to go up, especially in Canada, where the dollar looks positioned to take a 30-cent hit going into November. Since publishers (comic book, magazine, book) were unpardonably tardy to change their pricing to reflect the near-par between the Canadian and US dollar over the past 18 months, most comic book stores in Toronto have been offering either steep discounts or selling comics at US cover prices (which does make you wonder just what the newsstand mark-up on comics is) for the past two years. A sliding Canadian dollar is going to increase costs for retailers in a marketplace that already operates on thin margins. I'll be watching to see which way the market jumps in Toronto: comics are easily the most discretionary item on my entertainment budget. There's nothing out there that's worth the $2.99 - $5 per issue publishers are charging, not even the new series from Terry Moore (Echo) and Jeff Smith (Rasl).
They've released a collection of Ted Hughes' letters. Hughes' poetry is the work which most directly influenced my own, so I should probably read them. After I read the roomful of stuff I already have…
NPR gives my favourite spy some love – no, not James Bond, although I do find Daniel Craig delicious, Tara Chace
Worth Repeating: Sarah Vowel on Puritans, American exceptionalism and the US presidential race:
Q Your new book has come out just ahead of the U.S. election. Did you imagine it as a talking point in that context?
A Honestly, the book took about a year longer to write it than I thought it would, so no. But there were some current events-y reasons for writing the book, including the Iraq War as an example of American exceptionalism. And a lot of it was just my way of working through my terror of religious fanaticism after the terrorist attacks of 2001. It was cathartic writing about the homegrown religious fanatics of New England at a time when it seems like the whole world is awash in religious fanatics.
Q Who more closely resembles the Puritan founders, Barack Obama or John McCain?
A Obama talks about American exceptionalism and ... the responsibility in that. So he reminds me more of Winthrop than McCain does. Obama went to Harvard, the college that was founded by the Massachusetts Bay colonists, so he also has that whiff of New England about him: the bookish bent, the rhetoric and the oratory.
Q. And even Obama can't run for president without publicly asserting America's superiority.
A No, it wouldn't fly. It's a convention in American politics that you can't not say we're the greatest country on Earth. It's a difficult thing to live up to. And we frequently don't. So it tends to make us look hypocritical.
Uh, yeah, pretty much.
Also from NPR: the collapse of DC's MINX line and how the major publishers are getting "comics for girls" wrong (mostly by taking that approach to the marketplace).
The historian in me thinks this can't possibly end well.
On the road with Snow Patrol - note to self, check concert listings.
Read the awesomeness for yourself.
Civic Remembrance Day ceremonies in Toronto.
There will probably be one at the Veteran's Memorial at QP, too.
It was very strange being in Ireland last year over Remembrance Day. The Republic is still in some denial about Ireland's participation in WWI and the Free State officially sat out WWII, so no celebration of Remembrance Day. I was actually in Cambridge on the 11th, so although I missed the celebration, I got my poppy.
Michael Sleazak has announced that he's broken up with FRINGE and TRUE BLOOD
And MSN has broken up with BSG for SARAH CONNOR - ITA.