I know I probably ought to stick to nice, safe, non-flammable topics like Battlestar Galactica, but after reading today’s headlines and all the associated chatter buzzing through the blogosphere, I’ve just got to throw in my own two cents on the Iraqi election that took place over the weekend.
First of all, the Iraqi people should be commended for the courage and optimism they have just demonstrated to the world. I sincerely mean that.
I’ve thought a lot over the past few weeks about remakes, or “reimaginings,” as TV and movie producers have pretentiously taken to calling them. They’re nothing new, of course — updating older entertainment properties for a new generation has been a common industry practice since at least the early sound era, when a number of prominent silent films were redone as talkies. These days, however, there seem to be a lot more of them being made than there used to be. A recent TV Guide article listed about a dozen old TV shows that are currently being transformed into feature films. I imagine most of these will probably be of the smug, let’s-make-fun-of-the-entertainment-of-our-youth variety that’s been so popular recently. I hate those treatments, myself. I don’t see any reason to mock things simply because they’re a couple decades removed from the cutting edge. The thought of Jim Carrey as The Six Million Dollar Man, or greasy, potty-mouthed Colin Farrell filling Sonny Crockett’s shoes in a new Miami Vice makes me want to hurt someone. Badly. (By the way, I didn’t make up those projects or attach those names to them. They’re both for real, at least according to the aforementioned article.)
As much as I despise those disrespectful parodies, though, they’re generally easy to dismiss. They tend to have short lives at the box office and are quickly forgotten, while the original properties live on in the memories of those who love them. Sometimes the remakes even help the originals because a DVD release of the old frequently goes along with the marketing of the new. But what happens when the remake is no parody? What if the new version is a serious attempt to update and improve upon a property that was badly flawed, despite its charms? What’s the loyal fanboy to do when it turns out the remake actually is better than the original in many respects, and even seems poised to eclipse the memory of the original in the minds of the general public?
That’s the quandry I’ve been struggling with ever since the premiere of the SciFi Channel‘s new version of Battlestar Galactica.
I suspect that the passing of former Tonight Show host Johnny Carson hasn’t generated much grief in folks my age, and certainly not in those younger than thirty. It’s not that Gen-X has anything against Johnny; it’s just that he was, well, a little before our time. He was an icon for our parents, of course, but for those who didn’t start watching late-night programming until the late ’80s or so, his show always had the slightly stale whiff of a by-gone time about it. I used to think that Johnny’s Tonight Show felt like something Ward might’ve watched after putting Wally and the Beav to bed. It was strictly squaresville, daddy-o. I much preferred the in-your-face, absurdist quality of David Letterman, or even the youthful energy of Johnny’s replacement, Jay Leno. Today, Leno and Letterman have become the old-timers and the kids have got Conan and Jimmy Kimmel and probably others that I’ve never heard of, and they think they’re da bomb, or whatever the current trendyspeak for “cool” is. And you know what? They’re wrong. I was wrong back in the ’80s. The fact is, Johnny was better than all of them. Johnny was the epitome of cool. I was just too damn young and dumb to realize it.
It’s a foggy day here in the Salt Lake Valley, the kind of weather that shrinks your world down to a couple hundred feet in any direction and coats everything in a clammy layer of moisture that isn’t quite substantial enough to be actual water but is definitely a couple of notches below “dry.” I usually don’t mind days like this — unlike a lot of people I know, I don’t find them depressing and they don’t make me feel claustrophobic — but today I’m longing for some broader horizons. I’d love to be able to fly like Superman, so I could pierce through that numbingly gray ceiling and soar up into the sky, higher and higher until I reach the colorful and wonder-filled universe that lies above the earth. I can’t actually do that, of course… but through the magic of the InterWeb, I can vicariously experience some of the wonders that a little machine called Huygens has found.
I don’t have much to say about President Bush’s inauguration today. It is what it is, and frankly I don’t feel like picking a fight with anybody right now. I’m also trying to put aside some of the negativity that has dogged my thinking over the past couple of years (more for the sake of my own mental health and blood pressure numbers than because I’ve changed my mind about anything) and part of this effort is a conscious decision to limit my political ranting here in this space.
Nevertheless, I would like to quickly point out two articles that grabbed my attention this morning. What I find interesting about them is the sharp difference in attitudes they show between those who are staying on the White House staff and those who are leaving.
The first article, a Washington Post essay that reports on the Administration’s attitude since the election, notes that “President Bush and his Cabinet nominees have been sending a firm message as they kick off a second term: no mistakes, no regret, no comment.” (Registration required if you want to read the whole article. Sorry. WaPo is that way…)
Contrast that with the words of outgoing Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who says in an interview for an Australian paper, that he is “disappointed that Iraq hasn’t turned out better. And that we weren’t able to move forward more meaningfully in the Middle East peace process… [and] that we didn’t stop 9/11. And then in the wake of 9/11, instead of redoubling what is our traditional export of hope and optimism we exported our fear and our anger. And presented a very intense and angry face to the world. I regret that a lot.”
Make of this what you will. I know what I think about it, and how I feel about the fact that the folks running the show are apparently not willing to engage in any sort of self-reflection. Maybe that doesn’t matter these days, and maybe the voters actually prefer it this way. But like I said, I find the contrast interesting…
[Ed. note: if you don’t know Huygens from Jergens, read the preceding entry first.]
UPDATE (Sunday night, January 16): I discovered earlier today that the links I’ve provided to various ESA pages have been intermittently unavailable. I’m guessing that there’s been more demand than the ESA anticipated and they didn’t have the server capacity to keep up with it. In any event, the links seem to be working now, and I apologize to any of my loyal readers who’ve been clicking these links only to receive the dreaded “Server Not Found” screen for their troubles.
Here’s the first photo from Huygens, showing the surface of Titan.
Also, here’s an article about the microphone I mentioned before. God, I hope that works. There was a similar instrument on one of the Martian probes that went missing a couple of years back, and I remember feeling incredibly disappointed by that. I really want to hear what another world sounds like…
It’s an exciting day in space, as the European Space Agency’s Huygens probe has touched down on the surface of Titan, a moon orbiting the ringed planet Saturn.
My friend (and frequent Simple Trick commenter) Jennifer Broschinsky maintains a blog/diary over at LiveJournal, where she occasionally posts up one of the personal surveys that make the rounds of that online community. For the journaler/blogger, the point of these exercises is to reveal things about yourself that you might not think to write about without prompting. The point for the reader is to gain some insight into what makes your friends tick. Think of these surveys as the online equivalent of the handwritten notes we used to pass around in boring high school classes, the ones that asked embarrassing questions and which we always hesitated to return because we figured we’d look like a dork whichever way we answered.
A while back Jen put up a collection of topics that all began with “Five Things You May Not Know About…” I thought her answers were pretty interesting, and the questions that prompted them fairly stimulating, so naturally I nicked the thing for my own blog. Below are my answers to the “Five Things” survey. Enjoy!
The crew over at Boing Boing has pointed me toward a site that nicely refutes the dubious North Korean claim that long hair robs energy from the brain. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. Some of these undeniably brainy folks have achieved levels of hirsuteness that my own increasingly challenged follicles can only dream of. In some cases, the end result is really cool; in others, it’s a bit frightening. (No personal insult intended to the latter fellow, it’s just that, as much as I admire lengthy male tresses and guys who dare to express themselves, I think you can go too far with any particular look. I don’t want to know how much this guy spends annually on conditioner…)
One thing that I thought was cool, given my longtime affection for the rock group Queen, was the inclusion in the LFHC of guitarist Brian May, who is apparently quite the amateur star-gazer. Who would’ve guessed the guy responsible for “We Will Rock You” has a thing for astronomy?
As a current wearer of a ponytail that reaches my shoulder blades and the previous owner of a wicked-fine mullet (hey, it was the ’80s and it was cool back then… really!), I was extremely interested to learn that “long hair ‘consumes a great deal of nutrition’ and could thus rob the brain of energy.”
This little factoid comes from a North Korean media campaign called “Let us trim our hair in accordance with Socialist lifestyle.” Funny… most of the Socialists I knew in college had hair longer than mine. Not only that, but they didn’t use much product, either. Very untidy. Never seemed to affect their ideological fervor.
Tidiness matters in places other than hair, too. Here’s another important sartorial tip from Pyongyang: “No matter how good the clothes, if one does not wear tidy shoes, one’s personality will be downgraded.”
(Link courtesy of novelist William Gibson.)
