Spider-Man: The Musical

No, seriously.



My initial reaction upon hearing that U2's Bono and The Edge were working on a Broadway version of Spider-Man was pretty grim.  While I love Spider-Man and generally get a kick out of musicals, the pairing sounded disastrous.  Adding in a couple of pretentious sellout "rockers" was like adding stale croutons onto a shit salad (full disclosure -- I actually used to love U2, and still think the Joshua Tree is one of the best rock albums of my lifetime.  We parted ways after high school though, and these days I kind of just hate them in general).

But after watching this trailer, I'm actually really excited to see more.  Those villain masks look amazing, the fluidity of the set is eyebrow-raising, and the music is not unbearable (which is about as kind as I can be). 

My revised reaction; this has the potential to be awesome.



Photo by Annie Leibovitz



Auntie Matter's come to town!

There were so many interesting news stories out there today in the collective consciousness we've dubbed the Internet.  Briefly, here's the news that snagged my attention on this chilly November day:

Coolest news first; ladies and gentlemen, we have antimatter!  Which, apparently we've actually been able to create for a while now, but never for more than an instant or two.

Scientists have long been able to create individual particles of antimatter such as anti-protons, anti-neutrons and positrons – the opposite of electrons. Since 2002, they have also managed to lump these particles together to form anti-atoms, but until recently none could be trapped for long enough to study them, because atoms made of antimatter and matter annihilate each other in a burst of energy upon contact.


Me being the comic book fan that I am, I naturally start thinking of the Anti Monitor as the next logical step in the antimatter journey.

Anti Monitor!

Also, if anyone can come up with a better pun about antimatter and/or dark matter, leave me a comment.  "Auntie Matter" took an embarrassingly long time to come up with.

A copyright lawsuit between the estates of Superman creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster and Warner Bros. is once again moving forward.  The outcome of this case should finally answer the question of who actually owns one of the most iconic creations in American history.  Not to mention set up a precedent for pretty much EVERY other creator/publisher conflict in comic books.  Which could potentially cause chaos on a heretofore unseen level.  Should be interesting.  (I first read about this on Bleeding Cool, for the record.)

NPR is still under fire for, well, firing Juan Williams.  They were the first on the "American Idol, but with Really Important Ramifications," choose-your-own-defund-adventure thing that the Republicans have been working on.  Thankfully, the sneaky defund play was tidily defeated by the lame duck Democratic majority still in the House.  A movement to defund after the new year could be a whole different story.  Hopefully they'll have forgotten about NPR by then and will be back to just hating minorities in general.

It may snow this weekend here in Bellingham.  Possibly even tonight.  Goddammit.

Also in Bellingham, it looks like City Council's going to push the implementation of "traffic safety cameras" onto a half-dozen areas.  They're expected to make an announcement next Monday during the scheduled meeting.  I gotta say, as someone who's been covering this story pretty closely, this really doesn't sound like a good idea.  The monthly operating costs on each of these cameras alone is equivalent to a decent middle-income salary, and it's all going out the door to third-party contractors in Arizona.  Not to mention that both sides of the local political spectrum seem pretty united against the cameras.  This probably won't end well.

So that's what got my attention today.  What'd I miss?

"Your Highness," the redband edition

The redband trailer to "Your Highness" is out, to mixed reactions.  Personally, I can't wait to see this one.  I mean, come on.  A medieval action-comedy from the director of "Pineapple Express," and starring two of the three guys from "Pineapple Express."  How can this be anything but incredible?

Again, this is a redband trailer, so you probably shouldn't watch it at work.  There's lots of cussing and maybe even a little bit of nudity.  So bear that in mind before you click "play."  But then click "play."

Here are some more Your Highness trailers

A People's History of Ada, Oklahoma

One of the perks of my day job (aside from giving girls flowers all day) is I'm generally on the road driving all around the county for four to six hours at a time.  And thanks to the magic of audio books, I've been catching up on all those huge tomes I've been meaning to read for years.  Last Thanksgiving, it was Don Quixote.  April was spent on Moby Dick, which was much more darkly humorous than I had expected.  Over the summer it was Ulysses (seriously, it took about two months).  October was War and Peace, which was actually much less painful than I thought it'd be.



Howard Zinn

 In October I found an MP3 of Howard Zinn's  A People's History of the United States:  The 20th Century.  Read by Matt Damon, The 20th Century focused on the Civil Rights movement, Vietnam, and the first Gulf War.  Toward the end of the Gulf War section, Zinn highlighted some of the activist protests that began springing up across the country in late 1990.  I almost ran off the road when I heard Damon read this:

In Ada, Oklahoma, while East Central Oklahoma State University was "adopting" two National Guard units, two young women sat quietly on top of the concrete entrance gate with signs that read "Teach Peace ... Not War."  One of them, Patricia Biggs, said:  "I don't think we should be over there.  I don't think it's about justice and liberty, I think it's about economics.  The big oil corporations have a lot to do with what is going on over there....  We are risking people's lives for money."

How cool is this?  Ada, Oklahoma and East Central students were mentioned in arguably one of the the most influential history books of the 20th century.  How did I live ten years in this town (and spend five of those years attending classes at East Central) without ever knowing about this?  Hell, I was even a history minor for a while!

Theory v. Law v. Hypotheses

While verbally sparring with a friend online earlier, I stumbled upon a great little site that presents a very clear and concise definition of hypotheses, scientific law and scientific theory.  As anyone who's had these kinds of arguments on a regular basis knows, creationists, climate change deniers and the anti-science crowd in general all love to argue that a theory is really just an idea, not a concrete fact.  Evolutionary theory, quantum theory, chaos theory, string theory, climate change theory and all the rest are mere possibilities and should be treated as such, they claim.  Why?  Because they end in "theory."

Here's a great little explanation from the Wilstar site that helps to explain what a scientific theory actually is:

A scientific law is like a slingshot. A slingshot has but one moving part--the rubber band. If you put a rock in it and draw it back, the rock will fly out at a predictable speed, depending upon the distance the band is drawn back.


An automobile has many moving parts, all working in unison to perform the chore of transporting someone from one point to another point. An automobile is a complex piece of machinery. Sometimes, improvements are made to one or more component parts. A new set of spark plugs that are composed of a better alloy that can withstand heat better, for example, might replace the existing set. But the function of the automobile as a whole remains unchanged.


A theory is like the automobile. Components of it can be changed or improved upon, without changing the overall truth of the theory as a whole.

Keep this analogy in mind the next time you have to defend evolutionary theory in the public school system (or something along those lines).

'So if I own Mein Kampf I'm a supporter of Hitler?'

I got an interesting comment from a post made about a month ago called "People of the Book."  It was about an article written by Ted Widmer which explored the forgotten and/or ignored presence of Islam during the creation and infancy of our nation.  It's a fascinating article with a lot of interesting information that I didn't know beforehand, such as:

• Founding Fathers John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both owned their own copies of the Quran.
• The earliest documented instance of a copy of the Quran showing up in North America was 1683, almost a century before the Declaration of Independence (and there may have been even earlier instances, but this is the first documented account).
• The Massachusetts Constitution, written at around the same time as another significant Constitution (the drafting of which was assisted by John Adams), has this great bit in it: “the most ample of liberty of conscience” for “Deists, Mahometans, Jews and Christians.”
• 
  Muslims and Catholics were often held in the same "extremely foreign" religion category.
• Thomas Jefferson tried to learn Arabic, and his Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom was meant to protect "the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindoo and infidel of every denomination."
• Widmer:  "Jefferson and Adams led many of our early negotiations with the Islamic powers as the United States lurched into existence. A favorable treaty was signed with Morocco, simply because the Moroccans considered the Americans ahl-al-kitab, or 'people of the book,' similar to Muslims, who likewise eschewed the idolatry of Europe’s ornate state religions. When Adams was president, a treaty with Tripoli (Libya) insisted that the United States was 'not in any sense founded upon the Christian religion' and therefore has 'no character of enmity against the laws, religion and tranquility of Mussulmen.'
• Islam may have been a religious belief of up to 1 in every 5 African American slaves before emancipation.
• Washington in a letter to the people of Rhode Island:  "May the children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid."

Any way you cut it, Widmer's article shines a light on a little-explored area of American history.

So I was kind of surprised to get a comment on the post this morning from my old friend Steve.  "So if I own Mein kampf I'm a supporter of Hitler?"  My first response was to just write a comment back on the post.  But as I started to type, I had a hard time narrowing my responses down to just one argument.

Ergo, this post.  Feel free to apply one, any or all answers back to your comment, Steve.

• So I guess you didn't read the article, which was about much more than the quote I originally referenced.
• In a Fox News 24-hour spin cycle, you might be.  Look at Van Jones, for instance.  Or Shirley Sherrod.  You owning Mein Kampf could be spun that way.  That's not the truth, I'd imagine.  There's probably a lot more to it, as there was with Jefferson and Adams each owning their own copies.  But if you want to boil it down to a right-wing talking point without exploring the issue at all, then sure.  Heil Steve.
• Interesting how you compare ownership of the Quran to ownership of Mein Kampf.  And by 'interesting,' I mean 'disturbingly telling.'  Why not use another religious tome to make a comparison, like the Bible, the Torah, the Bhagavad Gita, the I-Ching, the Book of Mormon, Hubbard's "Dianetics," or the Zohar?  What makes you think that comparing the holy scripture of an established and widespread religion to an autobiography written by a genocidal fuckhead was accurate in any way?  Imagine I'm cooking dinner for Kristen and I tell you "Kristen loves tomatoes.  I bet she'd really like marinara sauce on her pasta."  And you reply by saying "So if I own Mein Kampf I'm a supporter of Hitler?"  That wouldn't exactly be an appropriate comparison, would it?  Nor is comparing the Quran to Mein Kampf.
• Do you actually own a copy of Mein Kampf?
• No, you're not a supporter of Hitler (that I know of).  And by posting an article about the history of Muslims in Colonial America, I'm not a Jihadist.  Or a historian.
• Did you know before reading my post that Adams and Jefferson personally owned copies of the Quran?  Do you think the majority of the Evangelical Right (or the US population in general) does?
• Your comment almost comes off as threatened by the fact that two of our country's founders owned Qurans.  Does this threaten you?

Eagerly awaiting your reply, Steve.  You should visit my blog more than once a month anyway...