A Wisconsin Yankee in Walt Disney's Court

Semi-regular updates should be coming along again; I’ve got various excuses. but I spent a lot of my late-night writing time going through the Simpsons season 11 DVD set, a ritual I go through with every new release, even if I’ve seen every episode 5 times.
The Simpsons was past its peak by this point; it had pretty much given up any vestige of its family sit-com roots and become a wacky hijinks show. The stand-out example, as pointed out self-consciously by the characters themselves, is the episode with the horse they rescue from a carnival. Early on, they did a sweet episode about Homer buying a pony to appease Lisa, and working two jobs but finally giving it up as a financial impossibility. Here, the old cliché with the broken down nag who’s actually the fastest racehorse ever is dragged out, then an absurd “the jockeys are really elves” plot is thrown on top of it. It’s a different show than it was the first 8 or 10 seasons.
The stand out events are Apu having 8 babies, which has some nice moments (I like Apu flipping out about the banana bread Marge brings to help them out– “What you you thinking?!” he screams as he’s trying to feed 8 kids at once like a human sow) but it goes off the deep end with the babies ending up in a zoo with Butch Patrick. “What were you thinking?” indeed. On the other end, Maude Flanders is killed, which just seemed callous and pointless in itself but it’s actually a pretty good episode and deals with the issue tastefully and in character, with a few good gags thrown in.
The other highlights are Homer’s 300 game (for the Ron Howard and Penn & Teller guest-bits, among other things), The tap-dance school episode that I always thought was funny, and the Behind the Music-parody season finale which predicted the end of the line for the show.
It’s 10 years later, and who knows when they’ll quit. It got worse, then got better, they made a movie and a theme park ride (which I’m like 10 miles from but haven’t seen yet) and the fast-food toys keep coming out. Speaking of, I need the Bart from the above set if anybody has an extra…

Being born in a generation taught that if the Bomb didn’t kill us all, Killer Bees would do it (if a Black Hole didn’t swallow us all first) left anyone my age pretty much numb to forecasts of the End Times. That isn’t to say they aren’t upon us though, in this age of upheaval. And what portents have made it clear to anyone who’s paying attention? The Stock Market collapsing? Our recent political upheaval? Global Warming? North Korean missiles? The Large Hadron Collider booting up again?

No, it was a few weeks ago when, on national major network television, a dozen fat people were locked in a darkened room with 3-foot-high piles of junk food while some model/actress watched them with night vision goggles. In all seriousness, with no laugh-track. Actually, tears were shed. And the scariest part, of course, is that you probably didn’t even hear about it.

I remember the same sense of fear and anger after seeing that Peter Jackson remake of King Kong and wondering why every newspaper headline and nightly news lead story didn’t warn me that the world had gone insane and somebody had spent hundreds of millions of dollars producing and promoting a movie in which the girl runs back to the giant gorilla and goes ice skating with it in Central Park. That’s a Saturday Night Live skit or a Mad Magazine parody, not a major motion picture.

Nobody cared then, and they don’t care now. Is it a by-product of our post-ironic culture that either of these things can be taken seriously? Or that all of our modern absurdities can be taken seriously? I have ESPN on as I write this, and I have never seen as stern-looking a group of grown men as this bunch of blowhards covering football. Football! You’d think they’d be the most light-hearted of broadcasters, but more grins were cracked during the live 9/11 coverage on CNN than on any Sunday of these schmucks. What has happened to football, anyway? It’s all gone touchy-feely; any time a player goes out of bounds on the opposing team’s side, it’s like a game of grab-ass broke out in Boy’s Town with every towel-boy and assistant trainer reaching out to get their hands on something. Remember a couple of Super Bowls past, when the rejoins from commercials featured artsy black-and-white photos of players cuddling the Lombardi Trophy that looked like out-takes from that benefit coffee-table book with Celine Dion and Morgan Freeman cradling premature babies? Not a mention on the sports pages, either story. I do hear Mike Ditka complaining about the butt-patting every now and then but he doesn’t count.

It’s not the end of the world, I know. We’ll get by, somehow. I don’t really buy into any of that apocalyptic stuff after all the broken promises. In my last crackpot book review, one of the loony conclusions was the nonsense about the Mayan calendar ending in 2012, and “Maybe they knew something” as one smug friend put it. Well, I don’t know what’s going to happen in 2012, but I know what’s going to happen on New Years Day 2013: there’d better be a line waiting to kiss my ass with every moron who’s ever insisted to me that there’s an ounce of relevance in an ancient mythology that they don’t even understand. There won’t be, of course; they’ll hem and haw and say “It could have happened!” or pull out some numerology that shows the Pope is the Antichrist so the Mayans were right. But I prefer happier predictions about the future these days.

I picked up Fingerprints of the Gods used and cheap a few weeks ago. I’ve always been a sucker for most brands of pseudoscience, and for a quarter I couldn’t pass up Graham Hancock’s fairly famous book.

Graham Hancock became a hero to hucksters and charlatans everywhere a while back when a British science show was forced to rebroadcast and amend an episode they did on some of the ideas he popularized in his books. In particular, the claim he presented that the 3 large pyramids at Giza are a sort of star map, accurately marking the alignment of the belt of Orion (Osiris to the Egyptians) in 10,500 BC. Apparently having an astronomer point out that it’s only similar if you look at it upside down and reversed was foul play, and the presenters were taken to task.

The basic run down to his theory is that there was some ancient civilization that we know nothing about which passed on all of it’s wisdom to the Egyptians and the South American/ Central American cultures. They, in turn, encoded information about them in their legends and architecture. And this ancient civilization lived in Antarctica. When it was ice free. And when it was much farther north than it is now.

All the usual suspects are dragged out for this one. The 1513 Piri Reis map is first out, which he claims shows an ice free Antarctica but which is clearly labeled as South America and as explored by the Portugese. If it was Antarctica, why would these advanced folks pass down information that showed it attached to South America? This thing has been bandied about for decades as anomalous, but it’s clearly not if the inscriptions are translated.

There’s the usual nonsense about “white gods” who aided various Native American cultures and promised to come back some day, and that’s what spooked the Aztecs into an instant surrender. The problem with that is that they were never called white, but were depicted as bearded; while most native Americans don’t grow beards, it’s not impossible. Montezuma had a beard when the Spanish showed up. And besides the whole thing being a much more complicated matter than generally depicted, contemporary accounts by the Aztecs described the Conquistadors as uncouth louts who dirtied too many dishes, hardly Gods.

Then there are the Egyptians, and the argument that the Sphinx and other certain monuments (even bases of some pyramids) are much older then we think. Again, there’s no real evidence, only conjecture.

It’s not a terrible read– the descriptions of the ruins on both continents are always interesting, and the story of a bribe-fueled climb up the great pyramid is fascinating. Some of the ideas are fun to wonder about, and there are genuine mysteries, or at least accomplishments we should be in awe of. There’s little doubt ancient man knew about the precession of the equinoxes early on, for one thing. Maybe they had nothing else to look at but the sky at night, but it still took some careful record keeping. And what use did the Egyptians have for the Osierion, a weird water-filled temple dedicated to Osiris that makes no sense to us today?

There are some nice original photos in the book, and even more diagrams. Well worth a read if you happen upon it, but take the extreme claims with a grain of salt…

I made this a few years back when I was heavily into racing radio controlled cars. They had a concourse prize at some of the big races sponsored by the manufacturer, and I won it once with a different car. This one lost out mainly because the cheap jerks didn’t include the set of detail decals with the body, and I couldn’t find any before the race. I entered it again at a later race, with the stickers and with some other hand-made details like windshield wipers and rear-view mirrors. I’d made the interior from scratch, including the Carl figure, and I thought I’d done enough to guarantee another win.

Wouldn’t you know it, some Japanese ringer showed up with a little sports car in the same class with an opening hood and doors and a complete replica engine, among other things. I serious doubt the thing was drivable, which oughta be a qualification, but what can you do. The guy was nice enough, and came over to see my car and asked about what I’d done, but of course I looked like a piker compared to all the detail he put in. I was going to try to do something like it later on, but I gave up on the racing soon after that.

So this is up on Ebay, with a lot more pictures if you care to take a look.

The web page for the local Scrabble tournament I did the logo for us up here.