This is a slightly more whimsical (and short) approach to a topic I spilled a great deal of ink on last week. I saw this bumper sticker on a traffic pole yesterday:
Clearly, a sticker done in homage to:
Is this good? Bad? Acceptable? Infringement? Legally fine but artistically dubious? Artistically clever but legally questionable? An unfair use of Bad Brains’s design to imply support from Bad Brains or their fans? A strategically bad decision of iconography, considering how different Bad Rabbits and Bad Brains are? Totally fine and rather cute or amusing?
I’m torn. All I know for sure is I checked them out because I thought they may be similar to Bad Brains, but they turned out to be entirely different (and I see very little crossover between these fan bases). I also think I may know some people in Bad Rabbits – at least a few went to Northeastern – so I should be careful before I rip on them too much.
Dresden Doll Amanda Palmer posted a cute little writeup on her hometown of Lexington, MA on the AFP Blog. One of the highlights of her writeup was the obligatory mention of the gratuitous number of Dunkin’ Donuts in this neck of the woods. In her town of roughly 30,000 there are six Dunks, which she maps out here.
I can certainly relate; I grew up in the same county, about five or six towns over. In my tiny town of roughly 9,500, we have 2:
It’s interesting that both Lexington and Townsend have roughly one Dunks for every 5,000 people. I wonder if that’s the target saturation ratio for Fred the Baker.
*** A few small spoilers follow. Caveat lector. ***
So like many I saw Watchmen this weekend (and by “weekend” I mean “midnight Thursday night with over a dozen friends”). Overall I was pleasantly surprised by how well they handled the story, which readers of the novel will tell you is a very impressive feat. The biggest fear of mine – whether the script would do justice to the ending of the book – was more or less placated; it was not exactly as it is in the book, and I say without hesitation that the book ending is far superior, but the modified ending does justice to the spirit of the book’s ending. Aside from a few groan-worthy love dialog bits, it’s worth the watch (provided you can stomach the content, which is not for the faint of heart).
My single biggest gripe about the movie is the music. Getting the music right in Watchmen should have been easy: nearly every chapter of the book ends with a song quote, and many scenes in the book explicitly state what Alan Moore had envisioned playing in the background. But these were dismissed, for licensing reasons, cross promotion considerations with Warner artists, or otherwise (Wired has a somewhat accusatory read on that subject), and instead we got bad Leonard Cohen covers, bad Leonard Cohen originals, and freakin’ “99 Luftballoons.” So much was missed by not including Iggy Pop, Devo, and Elvis Costello – all of which were in the book.
So, in the spirit of righting a wrong, here’s Elvis Costello’s “The Comedians” off of Goodbye Cruel World. I would have substituted it in place of the scene using “99 Luftballoons” in a heartbeat.
Elvis Costello – The Comedians
Update: seems that my friend Taylor posted a review of Watchmen within seconds of my own. We come to many of the same conclusions on the movie, which is very comforting to me, as the flicks are most certainly Taylor’s domain. In the past this might have sparked a blogagauntlet, but for now it’s just good comparison reading.
Since about 6AM this morning, on the 200-something RSS feeds I stay on top of, there have been maybe 15 new posts in total. Normally, you’d expect upwards of 75 on a Sunday morning. Then again, one of them did include the phrase “the wheels of justice have caught up to hamsters,” so I’m not counting it as a total wash.
I just wrote above that my experience with my feeds this morning was not a “wash.” To use wash in this way is to hearken back to WWI US Naval slang, where to “wash-out” an order was to declare the mission a failure or a neutralized position (i.e. the net benefit does not prevail). This both refers to what can happen to objects on deck when a wave hits a ship, but is thought to be more accurately derived from the method by which orders were transcribed on ships at sea. As orders that were taken from radio message or signal flags from the shore or other boats, the orders were taken down on a slate. When an order was cancelled, it would be washed off that slate, hence the order being a “wash-out.” At first it was used as a verb (e.g. “a lot of the new recruits were washed-out from basic training,”) and later became used as a noun.
I had a dream last night that I was writing a novel, and the star of my novel was an anti-hero character, whose claim to fame up to this point had been that she was the hand model on kitchen supply infomercials who does the inept “before” shot where the person is having a terrible time cutting an onion, or cooking in non-stick cookware, or trying to peel potatoes and failing. You know, the person at the opening of this infomercial:
Or the poor, pathetic potato peeler:
Or the person flailing at the opening of the Snuggie infomercial:
In my dream I had developed this somewhat amusing backstory, about how she really wanted to be a deadpan comic (or perhaps an author) and how a long series of sad events had taken her from sarcastic in a Sinfeld way, to sarcastic in a Steven Wright way, to straight out depressed, and that her colleagues only thought it made her better as a “before” lady and did not see the inner turmoil (I’m using “before lady” as a placeholder for a better faux-industry term for the person in the shot I’ve yet to develop – my thought was to play something off of how they always show that person in black and white at the opening – the “monochromer” or something). I don’t remember what she actually did in the story; I just remember this character.
At any rate, I don’t anticipate I’ll be writing any novels anytime soon, so if any of my friends want to work with me in developing this character for their own purposes, let me know. I’ll leave you with my favorite “monochromer” I found while doing some character research this morning:
(Still better. From Flickr user 
