Year: 2015

I’m figuring that pretty much everyone who is going to see it has seen it already. So off we go. There are copious spoilers attached.

Continue Reading “So…STAR WARS. My thoughts.” →

This will be the first of a few blogs I’ll be doing about “Star Wars.” I’m waiting a little before I do stuff with spoilers, but I thought I’d address this current bit of business that’s bopping around the internet. Namely, is Rey a Mary Sue?

The answer is, Of course not.

A Mary Sue is something very specific: a female hero substitute for a fannish author so that she can interact with Kirk or Spock or whomever. She is generally so fabulous in everything that she does that all the male characters fall in love with her. That’s Mary Sue.

It seems absurd to transform Mary Sue into the current definition that’s rattling around: the addition of a strong female character into an already existing universe. If we stick with that definition, Supergirl is a Mary Sue. So is Batgirl. Of more recent vintage, Silk.

Furthermore, Rey is not a Mary Sue for the simplest reason of all: the authors of the work are male. She can’t be wish fulfillment for a female writer because a female didn’t write it. End of story.

Glad I could clear that up.

PAD

Why? Because it’s the simplest way to avoid “Star Wars” spoilers. I do not believe for a moment that people will attend to the “No Spoilers!” pleadings that I’m seeing everywhere. So I figure the onus is on me to simply stay off line until I see it.

Which will be Thursday evening at 7 PM at a screening arranged by Fourth World Comics, my comics store in Long Island.

PAD

So I just stumbled over “The Paper” on cable, a wonderful comedy/drama with Michael Keaton and Glenn Close made back in 1994. And in watching it, I was struck again by just how much the world has changed in a mere 20 years.

The climax of the film (it’s two decades old; deal with the spoilers) hinges on the fact that the newspaper has a front page headline that subsequent investigation reveals to be false. Keaton’s character stops the presses so it can replated and changed (thus exonerating two black youths falsely accused of a crime) but Close’s character, the EIC, starts the paper up again and fires Keaton’s character. Later on, though, she has a change of heart, stops the press herself and has it fixed to run the correct headline. Presumably she swallows the expense of destroying the already published newspapers so that they can get it correct.

And as I watched it, I realized that would never happen today. They would send out the incorrect newspaper so they wouldn’t incur the expense of the unused papers, but they would immediately update the website. The printed paper would seem an interesting but inaccurate sidelight while the online version would be out there with the correct story. End of problem.

Kind of kills the drama.

PAD

I have no idea who wrote the following; it isn’t credited. If he happens to be reading this, he should let me know. I very much doubt he (or she) will object to my reproducing it here:

People will recall that, not so long ago, Senator James Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, in order to conclusively demonstrate that claims of man-made climate change were false, made a snowball after a February storm and threw it on the Senate floor. I demonstrate it thus! If I see frozen water, how can the planet be warming? What was so beautiful about this demonstration was that it did not even depend on a snowball made out of season, one packed and tossed, say, in September or April—this was a mid-wintersnowball, and it still refuted global warming, for once and all.

Anyone who follows the debate on any public issue discovers that the snowball-in-the-Senate style of argumentation persists, with the same note of smugness—that’ll show them! It most often comes from the same political direction, or party, and with the same disconnection from all familiar standards of evidence and argument. In the debate about the necessity of bringing America into agreement with the rest of the civilized world on the issue of guns and gun killings, there are some persistent snowballs-in-the-Senate that keep getting thrown, which need to be mopped up as they melt.

Continue Reading “Great anti-gun piece from the New Yorker” →

Looking for a good Xmas or Chanukah present? The itinerant knight errant, SIR APROPOS OF NOTHING, is back in print through Crazy 8 Press and can be purchased on Amazon. The paperback with a new Robin Riggs cover is available right now, and the eBook will be up within a week. Buy it and read it now so that early next year when the new Apropos adventure, PYRAMID SCHEMES, is available, you’ll be familiar with him.

Here’s the link:

Sir Apropos of Nothing

PAD

Some of you met Caroline when she was two months old: we got snowed in at the Farpoint convention which was dubbed “Snowcon.” Everyone was worried about her. “Is there enough food for the baby?” kept being asked. Our response was simple: “She’s nursing. Feed the mom and the baby is fine.”

And now she’s thirteen. The first child I’ve had who became a teenager without the threat of a divorce hanging over her head, so this birthday is a lot more relaxed. Plus it’s not snowing today, which is surprising. She was born on the day of a horrific snowstorm and it has snowed on the vast majority of her birthdays since then. Tomorrow is her party which will be Harry Potter themed.

Please join me in wishing my little girl a happy 13th birthday.

PAD