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1. I linked to a parodic gay Star Trek video yesterday, but here’s a straighter Trek note to compensate: Let it never be forgotten, while you female readers are rushing off to see the new Sex and the City movie, that co-star Kim Cattrall was previously the traitorous Vulcan named Valeris in Star Trek VI. She’ll never occupy exactly the same place in normals’ fantasties that she does in nerds’ — and her betrayal of the Federation demands severe punishment, obviously.

But Kim Cattrall says she studied the life of Che Guevara as preparation for Valeris, and I have to applaud anyone who sees parallels between a communist mass-murderer like Guevara and a traitorous ally of the hated Klingons.

2. On another poli-sci-fi note, I notice the Wiki. entry for William Monahan quotes his fellow NYPress veteran (and mine) Dawn Eden (about whom more in tomorrow’s Retro-Journal entry) as saying he was witty and “libertarian-leaning.” It also says he was the writer of the Jurassic Park IV script draft preceding John Sayles’. I don’t know anything more about Monahan’s draft specifically, but Sayles’ sounds (from what I’ve read) like it’d be the greatest movie ever if they filmed it, pitting regular dinosaurs against a genetically-engineered team of trained super-dinosaurs with bits of human and dog DNA that give them team loyalty, high intelligence, opposable thumbs, and the ability to shoot machine guns — and they are all given Greek god codenames by the mercenary who frees them from captivity at the mountain HQ of an evil Swiss biotech firm. How could that not be awesome? The only thing better would be a movie version of Jack Kirby’s Devil Dinosaur (but at least we’ll see his New Gods characters revamped in two weeks when Final Crisis issue #1 hits comic shops).

Unmentioned in the Monahan entry is his rejected NYPress essay “My Shits,” which would have been a chronicle of his bowel movements over several days, certainly a piece that someone had to write sooner or later, given the Family Guy-like ever-grosser trajectory of the Press back then.

P.S. I recently got what may have been the vaguest spam e-mail appeal I’ve ever seen — or simply a communication from a distant part of the Federation — with a subject header offering me “items for humans.” Who couldn’t use some of those?

P.P.S. In a reminder that humans aren’t the only possible customers, here’s a Scientific American piece on the poor guy who (really) “married” and got dumped by a robot — sort of like not being good enough for a Tamagotchi — pointed out to me by FrontPage’s Jacob Laskin, one of my many fascinating fellow Phillips Foundation Fellows (perhaps I’ll see one or more of them at tonight’s black-tie Milton Friedman Prize awards event at the Waldorf-Astoria).

Much as I love the nerdy New Wave music genre, I’m often reminded, with wistfulness and nostalgia, that some of the greatest 80s songs didn’t quite fit the New Wave niche nor other obvious categories like classic rock and thus have not been remembered as vividly as they should be. For example:

•“Voices” by Russ Ballard: I wonder if the video helped inspire the song’s use in a pivotal Miami Vice episode — you know, the one where the speedboat’s headed off to get Calderone at the end of the first episode in the two-parter.

•“How Can I Refuse?” by Heart: I think this song best captures the good qualities of both their early classic-rock period and their later 80s-pop period but sometimes falls through the cracks of memory by belonging to neither category fully. It starts out as a mere performance video (though that’s pleasant enough, since Ann Wilson hadn’t yet undergone the climactic final expansion that would leave her looking forevermore like the fake-fat-lady suit from Total Recall), but then it has some delightfully stereotypical 80s surrealist/magic imagery toward the end, which is also true of the video for…

•“Back Where I Started” by Box of Frogs: Made up partly of ex-Yardbirds, I think this band was cool and should have been bigger — but may have hovered too oddly between art rock and hard rock, sort of like Rush, for most people’s tastes, and speaking of ex-Yardbirds…

•“Forever Man” by Eric Clapton: This may be my favorite Eric Clapton song (I mean solo, of course — Cream rules), though it isn’t the first one people think of. Perhaps liking this one means I inherited some of Dad’s Bob Seger-type tendencies after all.

•On more of a 90s note, but another reminder that the good stuff doesn’t always typify its genre, one of my favorite lyrics passages in alternative rock history (beloved by some of my college pals as well) is this thoroughly bluesy Social Distortion snippet from the maudlin “Ball and Chain”:

When I wake there in the morning
Or maybe in the county jail
I’ll know times are hard, gettin’ harder
Born to lose, destined to fail

•And since this is supposed to be the Month of the Nerd, after all, here’s a video of gay-seeming Star Trek clips set to Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer.”

For me, the grand slam is connecting my four favorite topics (which readers must sometimes fear are the only four topics I like): (1) libertarianism, (2) science, (3) sci-fi-type stuff, and (4) rock n’ roll. I’m delighted, then, to notice a bit of trivia that connects the four, just in time for this, my 300th ToddSeavey.com blog entry (and since the site’s only just over a year old as a fully-functional thing, that means I’ve been blogging roughly daily after all — and with those entries averaging about 800 words a piece, it’s hard to believe that some 17 billion of you find the time to read this site every day, but thank you).

Here is that bit of trivia:

I criticized (1) libertarian (2) psychiatrist Thomas Szasz recently on this site and have done so at greater length on FactsAndFears (and in Liberty magazine) — but I did not mention that (3) he inspired a similarly-named Batman villain, a homicidal psycho named Zsasz who, oddly enough, is played (briefly) in Batman Begins by (4) the yodely-sounding former lead singer of the band James.

Don’t try carving a diagram of all those connections into your flesh after your next kill, though, please. Remember: Zsasziness doesn’t pay.

Fittingly, I’ve just learned AEI has a panel coming up on the violent consequences of failure to treat severe mental illness.

(In my mind — and one day a couple of book proposals, schedule willing — you could almost reduce my four favorite topics to two oppositions: fiscal conservatism vs. the wildness of punk, and scientific reality vs. the allure of imagining the impossible.)

P.S. In more substantial and more narrowly libertarian news, Bob Barr officially announced his presidential candidacy yesterday, giving new relevance to our perhaps obscure-sounding topic for the June 4 Debate at Lolita Bar.

P.P.S. One subset of the populace that I think Barr will have a hard time winning over, by the way, is the 15% of Americans who, in multiple recent polls, say the country is “headed in the right direction.”

Well, last time I checked, I failed to find any clips of Wild Record Party (a short-lived, insane cable access show here featuring stuffed animals and puppets dancing to various old garage-rock-type numbers in front of album-cover backdrops) on YouTube, but, as it happens — since I don’t have cable and just watch the handful of broadcast channels I pick up — as of just recently, channel 6 on my set, which used to be blank, now seems to be picking up two unrelated signals: some animal documentary channel, albeit in black and white and without sound, plus the sound from some very loud dance/pop radio station, so now I occasionally find myself mesmerized by some trashy techno-disco number over an image of a very slow-moving, fat raccoon or something.

It will have to do.

On a related note, watch for a cameo by Winnie the Pooh in this Friday’s Retro-Journal entry.

ADDENDUM: I should give credit to Courtney Balaker, formerly of ABC News, now of Neo Art and Logic in Hollywood, for first telling me of Wild Record Party.

•If you thought comparisons several months ago of Hillary Clinton to Thatcher were odd, check out how one UK blog sees her — as a Ron Paul figure (and not just because, like Paul, she doesn’t know when to stop).

•But enough about Hillary.  With her fading, it’s time for all loyal Operation Chaos operatives to turn their efforts against the presumptive Democratic nominee, Barack Obama — and this parody (pointed out to me, for non-partisan comedy reasons, by Paul Taylor) of the Obama “Yes, We Can” video helps (and features Cobra Commander).

•On an even nerdier note: this frightens me more than the impending Final Crisis comic book with its invasion of evil gods: Judd Winick (yes, the one from Real World, now a comic book writer) is doing a comic about the DC superheroes’ politics.  They quite literally intend to give new meaning to “Superman Red/Superman Blue.”

I suspect the character Anarky and a libertarian version of Uncle Sam will not be central to the plot — and that Batman will not explicitly encourage vigilantism despite clearly being a crime-hating DIY millionaire (who tellingly complained early in Batman Begins that his fellow Princeton students did not share his views — though of course we are probably meant to see his Batman incarnation as a step away from his original kill-Joe-Chill tough-on-crime conservatism, since growth = moving leftward, at least in the media).

In yesterday’s Retro-Journal entry, I mentioned McCain liking Teddy Roosevelt. TR was also a factor in my recent book review for New York Post of Panama Fever. And I think both TR and the fading Hillary Clinton were called socialists, which sounds about right to me, by Bill O’Reilly after HRC likened herself to TR during her recent appearance on O’Reilly’s show.

(As I’ve been telling co-workers at ACSH this week, with some half-million people dead in Burma, it’s worth reminding people at every possible opportunity that socialist inefficiency shortens and ends lives, on top of the 150 million or so that socialist movements have murdered outright. Don’t expect me to treat the next socialist hippie chick I meet with the deference due someone who possesses the moral high ground — though Burma could certainly use some high ground right about now.)

Three Teddy Roosevelt Movie Ideas

•But all this reminds me of my TR movie idea (as copyrighted as all the other text on this site, you thieving Hollywood bastards): We know writers sometimes accompanied TR on his occasional nighttime walks around New York City when he was police commissioner — including a writer named Bram Stoker. So: what if it was one fateful patrol in which TR battled vampires that inspired Dracula? It could all end with the two heroes battling vampire prostitutes (the late-nineteenth-century analogue of socialist hippie chicks) atop the Flatiron Building Read the rest of this entry »

Today, audiences thrill to the big-screen adventures of Speed Racer — much as they thrilled to our debate on congestion pricing for Manhattan traffic on Wednesday — but six years ago…

I first met people who explored the City not horizontally but vertically, the “urban exploration” buffs of the Jinx Society, who ventured into sewers and aqueducts, climbed skyscrapers and collapsing old rooftops to see history close up and brave this ever-changing town’s Invisible Frontier, as the title of Jinx leaders LB Deyo and Lefty Leibowitz’s book put it. Both men are true patriots, in love with America’s past and its future potential — and oddly enough, it was the spectre of communism that first brought me into contact with them.

I accompanied my Marxist friend Sander Hicks to his debate against LB on globalization — part of the monthly series that would fission off from Jinx some three years later to become the Debates at Lolita Bar, hosted by me and moderated by Michel “the Brain” Evanchik. I recall that the very week of 9/11/01, the cover of National Review, planned before the attacks, was an article critical of the antiglobalization movement and its manifesto of the moment — which was very popular at college campuses across America — Empire, co-written by widely respected Italian terrorist/murderer Antonio Negri.

Even before the ruins of the World Trade Center had settled, some guessed that, given the target, the antiglobalization movement might be responsible. It wasn’t that far-fetched an idea — Sander, for example, is no terrorist, but until reading the works of Gandhi in recent years, he had seen old-fashioned violent revolution as a viable option, and in his debate against Read the rest of this entry »

Since ancient times, men of learning (like the ones who gathered at last night’s congestion pricing debate) have recognized that to be well-rounded, one should know not only the ways of the Time Trapper and the Sith but also the laws of the natural world.

Toward that end, New York City will be overrun in three weeks by the 2008 World Science Festival, something well worth investigating if you want some highbrow fun from May 28-June 1 (though I’m thinking I may spend the entire final day of May watching Star Wars Episodes III-VI — count carefully, and you’ll know I’m right — plus rewatching this month’s major geek films and rereading Final Crisis #1).

My coworkers at the American Council on Science and Health are the sort of folk who also might attend the Science Festival, when they can take time away from maintaining HealthFactsAndFears, TheScooponSmoking, and the dread Riskometer, of course. I’m not sure any of them know who the Time Trapper is, though — not even our youngest staffers, Krystal, Krystal, and Crysthal (no joking, and the staff only has thirteen people) — which is why they need me.

But more about ACSH in tomorrow’s Retro-Journal entry, which will discuss the epochal turning point that was early 2002.

In the meantime, here’s a reminder from Reason about where deconstructionism and feminism — one a philosophy that denies the possibility of objective, scientific facts, the other a philosophy that merely denies certain specific facts — lead: to the greatest story in the history of the world about anything ever since the dawn of time.

I only just learned, from Wiki., that it’s unclear that the Library at Alexandria was actually destroyed, let alone burned by barbarians, which counts as some sort of ironic meta-meta-meta-ignorance, I think.

But speaking of hot librarians, remember that tonight at 8 all the brainy folk will be at Lolita Bar for our big debate on congestion pricing, which may even involve numbers for a change.

And in other nerd/history news, we bid farewell this week to Ted Key (age ninety-five), the creator of history-touring dog genius Mr. Peabody, among other characters. Set the Wayback Machine for respectful silence.

The Drudge-linked item about Newt warning the GOP to shape up is in fact about three layers of competing cosmetic bullshit, wrapped in book-promotion PR by Newt, wrapped in an article by Dennis Kucinich’s daughter, which strikes me as a fascinating little capsule lesson in how far removed from dealing in an un-spun, non-partisan way with real problems we are.

OK, this is only partly a sci-fi-nerd question, but: What do Iron Man, Bobby Jindal, and I all have in common? Grappling, as conservatives, with Brown University.

•At least, one antiwar reporter character who gives Tony Stark a hard time in Iron Man is described as a Brown grad (and goes on to reveal other behavior patterns often associated with Brown alums).

•My problems with Brown have been related in multiple installments of my Retro-Journal, you’ll recall.

•And Jindal — for whom if I remember correctly I was briefly a writing tutor, though it’s all pretty fuzzy now, I admit (so if I blog of him in the future, let this be my permanent disclaimer that I’m not saying I was some sort of mentor to him) — became Catholic and conservative while at Brown, going on to serve (with a special emphasis on health care and a fondness for free markets) in the White House, the Louisiana congressional delegation, and the Louisiana governor’s mansion, with some (like William Kristol) now saying McCain’s v.p. running mate slot might be his next move.

Intelligence is so rare among politicians that a smart guy can go far quickly — and I still won’t quite yet think of myself as truly old even if I find that in Read the rest of this entry »

This year belongs to all nerds — with an upbeat May (Iron Man, Speed Racer, Prince Caspian, Indy), unpredictable June (Hulk), dark July (Batman, Hellboy, X-Files), British November (Harry Potter, Bond), and UFOlogical December (Keanu in The Day the Earth Stood Still).

Next year, a bit quieter by my reckoning, belongs mainly to the discriminating superhero and sci-fi fans: Watchmen on March 6, followed by a May almost as nerdy as this year’s (Wolverine, Star Trek, Terminator).

But 2010 and 2011, for those planning ahead (and trusting current release schedules), belong solidly to the “fantasy” fans, with both the final Harry Potter book and The Hobbit scheduled to be split in half and released as two films apiece (the latter directed by Hellboy’s/Pan’s del Toro). I’m not sure any of us are psychologically prepared for the state of anticipation in which nerds will find themselves between 2010’s end and the 2011 release of the conclusions of Deathly Hallows and del Toro’s Hobbit. The Christian nerds, furthermore, will have glimpsed the mountains of Aslan’s heavenly kingdom at the conclusion of the middle film of the planned five-film Narnia cycle, Voyage of the Dawn Treader (and if the Narnia films keep doing well, I predict they’ll be followed by The Magician’s Nephew as a prequel, Hobbit-style).

Oddly enough, if all goes as scheduled, though, this means the only nerd film I’m pretty confident is scheduled for 2012 — the dreaded year the mystics think will bring the end of the world per the ancient Mayan calendar Read the rest of this entry »

No more entries on the complexities of DC Comics continuity (I already did two and my Month of the Nerd is only on its fourth day).  Indeed, if one too deeply contemplates DC continuity problems, one will end up like Batman in this disturbing video clip (akin in some ways to the classic “Insanity Test” video clip).

Let us instead reflect upon Marvel Comics today — this is the opening weekend of their Iron Man movie, after all — both the good and the bad.

I think Marvel’s virtues (basically, as I see it, a certain real-world, hard-sci-fi feel as compared to fanciful, old-fashioned DC) have been summed up quite well by the wonderful town of Austin, TX with the Alamo Drafthouse theatre’s excellent decision to have guys using real jet packs at the Austin premiere of Iron Man.

That’s the same alcohol-serving movie theatre where I drank sangria with my free-market-loving pals Scott Nybakken, Christine Caldwell Ames, and LB Deyo while watching Team America, preceded by a screening of an episode of Thunderbirds, the sci-fi marionette show that was my favorite thing in the world at age four and the inspiration for Team America — probably the best overall movie-watching experience of my life, in other words.  The Drafthouse is also the site of AintItCool.com’s annual Butt-Numb-athon nerd-film festival and is where LB and I got to do live movie voiceovers as part of one of Buzz Moran’s infamous “Foleyvision” soundless screenings of crappy films, in this case the appalling Witches of Bali, about a cursed (and surprisingly unattractive) German journalist touring Bali whose head detaches and flies around at night Read the rest of this entry »

Given that DC Comics’ miniseries Final Crisis starts at the end of this month, here’s a mind-breaking question about the prior “Crisis” events for nerd readers to argue endlessly about in the Responses below — the question that DC editors and writers endlessly dodge or give contradictory, off-the-cuff answers to, lacking the Nietzschean courage to stare directly into the abyss for fear of going mad:

In New Earth history (that is, the history of the main world as it was remade in DC Comics’ Infinite Crisis miniseries and 52 in 2005-2007), was the big Crisis of a few years earlier, the one involving the Anti-Monitor’s shadow demons and the death of Barry Allen, a Crisis on Infinite Earths (as the title of the original mini-series called it back in 1985) or merely a Crisis on 52 Earths (since New Earth exists in a finite multiverse, unlike the infinite one in which DC Comics stories used to take place, back in the days when the Anti-Monitor’s first appearance was actually published) — or was it perhaps even a Crisis on One Earth (the New one, whose inhabitants arguably only recently became aware of alternate Earths)? What did the people now living see during the big Crisis, and what did the surviving heroes think about the state of the multiverse when that Crisis ended? And if you answer, please specify which multiverse.

I notice that many fans — some with an enviable naivete that spares them even having to get headaches about this stuff — will readily and confidently Read the rest of this entry »

Today, audiences are enjoying the Iron Man movie, about a weapons merchant whose own technology is used against him but who fights back.

Back in the summer of 2001, shortly before American technology was turned against itself by terrorists, I had just left the employment of John Stossel — who looks a bit like Tony Stark — and soon thereafter found myself attending the funeral of a decidedly low-tech but powerful personage: my maternal grandfather, lifelong farmer Earl Geer (leaving me with one living grandparent, my still-thriving paternal grandmother, Florence Seavey, now ninety-four). I wore an old white shirt of Grandpa Geer’s to an event within just the past several days — which was partly fun, partly a continuation of my Douglas Hofstadter-influenced eulogy from back in July 2001.

One of the more upbeat gatherings of that summer, though, was a seminar run by political science professor Jeffrey Friedman under the auspices of the political philosophy journal he edits, Critical Review. Each summer, he’d badger a small group of libertarians into confronting non-libertarian ideas and a small group of non-libertarians into confronting libertarian ideas, in hopes of creating some common ground and intellectual flexibility of the sort necessary for serious academic discussion instead of party in-fighting. I’m indebted to Andrea Rich for suggesting to Friedman that I attend (and for putting up with my criticisms, as in my prior Retro-Journal entry, of Szasz, who she admires, as do many libertarians and even non-libertarians).

That tiny CR group — about fourteen people — meeting for a couple days in August 2001 ended up being my first or near-first meeting with several interesting personalities with whom I’d go on to have further contact, including Julian Sanchez and Katherine Mangu-Ward (later members of Reason’s editorial staff), Peter Suderman (later of National Review) [NOTE: different guy], Michael Malice (now a New York Times best-selling author on the topic of ultimate fighting — not to mention a trivia host on May 14), then-philosophy-student now-finance-guy Phineas Upham (who once danced with Natalie Portman at Harvard, I have to note, just in case he doesn’t get credit for it anywhere else), Elizabeth Koch (who’d go on to write for Reason and co-edit Opium), and a Rand-reading dancer who said she suspected she was invited because she has “a nice ass.” Read the rest of this entry »