As fate would have it, today, in addition to the 30th anniversary of Star Wars, is also Towel Day, the international tribute to the late Douglas Adams. The 25th of May is a very hoopy day indeed.

Speaking of Britney Spears (well, I did mention her yesterday), I’ve been thinking about her head-shaving escapade last weekend and the way the media has reacted to it.

I know, I know… it’s a lame non-story that everyone is sick of, and I imagine at least one of my celebrity-contemptuous Loyal Readers just rolled his eyes and clicked off to some other site. Still, I just keep coming back to the subject in my mind, like a loose tooth that I feel compelled to wiggle with my tongue. The truth is, as ridiculous and messed-up a person as she seems to be, I really do care about what’s happening to her, at least in as much as I care about any human being who’s obviously in a whole world of confusion and hurt. I feel sorry for the girl. And I feel genuinely angry at the way the entertainment “news” media — i.e., all the television tabloid and gossip shows — are exploiting her and that other hapless train wreck of a human being, Anna Nicole Smith, for the sake of sensationalistic headlines and, presumably, higher ratings.

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Ever wonder what the “E” in “Wile E. Coyote” stands for? Yeah, me, neither, but Mark Evanier has an interesting answer nonetheless.

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If you’ve been hanging around this place for any length of time, you’ve probably got a pretty good handle on my tastes in entertainment. I like pulp adventures, science fiction movies, superhero comics, horror novels, and British comedy. In the simplest possible terms, I’m a geek. But aside from the social stigma of daring to like such things, what is the connection between them? Why is the core appeal of all these various genres?

A blogger named John Seavey has a pretty good idea:

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I know, I know, this makes three video entries in a row. What can I say? I keep finding stuff that amuses me. Just play the clip…

Ah, Defender… I wasted many hours of my life on that one…

To hell with all this election stuff, the really important news of the day is that Britney is divorcing the odious K-Fed! Our long national nightmare is over! It already seems that the sun in shining a bit more brightly…

Tragedy! According to an article in the LA Times, Union Products, the company that has been churning out 250,000 plastic lawn flamingoes a year for just under a half-century, has shuttered its factory due to rising production costs. The company’s president, Dennis Plante, and the creator of the kitsch icon, Don Featherstone, are looking for another company that may be interested in acquiring the molds, but there’s no deal yet.

I’d better inform my mother. She’ll want to horde a few sets of the silly things, just in case…

Here’re some more amusing photos from the e-mail, this time courtesy of the inimitable Chenopup, who wanted to share with me his latest acquisition:

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Hmm… this is an interesting experiment: someone has created a mash-up that places video from both versions of the classic Twilight Zone episode “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet” side-by-side and sets it all to music by the band Pop Will Eat Itself. “Nightmare” is arguably the most famous Zone story; it’s the one where a nervous flyer, played by a pre-Star Trek William Shatner in the original television segment and by John Lithgow in the 1983 TZ feature film, sees a gremlin tearing apart the plane and tries desperately to get someone to believe him. It’s been parodied or referenced dozens of times, most notably in one of the The Simpsons‘ Halloween specials. I’m not sure what the intention of this video may have been, but it gives us movie-buffs a handy way to compare and contrast the two versions. You can probably guess which I prefer:

While I greatly admire John Lithgow and have always enjoyed his performance in Twilight Zone: The Movie, I think The Shat — long derided as an over-the-top cheeseball of an actor — actually delivers a more subtle performance than Lithgow in this role. In fact, I’ve long maintained that Shatner is — or at least used to be — a far better actor than most people believe. If you study his pre-Trek work in The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, and other early television anthology series, or for that matter his performances in the first two seasons of Star Trek, you’ll see a talented and charismatic young man who was destined for stardom. My personal belief is that he got lazy along the way, simultaneously weighed down by the burden of having been Captain Kirk and puffed up by the adoration of the Trekkies, and from the mid-70s onward, it took a strong directorial hand to force him to deliver the goods. (Nicholas Meyer squeezed a good performance from him for The Wrath of Khan — not counting the “Khhhhhaaaaaaaaannnnnn!!!!” scene — and his old buddy Leonard Nimoy did the same for The Search for Spock. The scene in TSFS when Kirk learns over the radio that his son has just been knifed to death is absolutely heartwrenching.)

When I was a kid, I often mashed together elements of various fictional universes in my imagination. Thus, it wasn’t uncommon for me to imagine an adventure in which Mr. Spock was hanging out on the Millenium Falcon with Han and Chewie while they were on their way to pick up Aquaman. Apparently, one grown-up fanboy still likes to combine his various interests:

As always, click for a bigger view, if you dare…

[FYI, this photo comes from this year’s Comic-Con; a gallery of other costumes can be found here.]