MemeMachineGo!

A couple of commenters thought I was being unfair to conclude that Mel Gibson is an anti-Semitic nutcase and to shun his movies. Well, like Slate said:

Is Mel Gibson an anti-Semite? Until his recent drunk-driving arrest, the only way to investigate that hypothesis was to study Gibson’s controversial 2004 film, The Passion of the Christ, or to puzzle out why Gibson, in an interview with Peggy Noonan for Reader’s Digest, declined to put any distance between himself and his father’s crackpot view that the Holocaust never occurred. “[I]f someone denies the Holocaust one day and makes a film accusing Jews of Christ-killing the next day,” my Slate colleague Christopher Hitchens reasoned, “I have to say that if he’s not anti-Jewish then he’s certainly getting there.” There remained at least a theoretical possibility that this was all just a terrible misunderstanding.

That possibility no longer exists. The best case that can be made for Gibson’s belief system now is that he’s anti-Semitic only when he’s three sheets to the wind. And really, now. Are you in the habit of declaring, “The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world” when you get pie-eyed? Or simply of muttering, “Fucking Jews”? Or of asking your arresting officer, “Are you a Jew?”

There is a silver lining to this story. I think Gibson probably would have entered politics. I think this incident pretty much puts an end to that. But, then, the ablity of some on the right to act as apologist for unsavory characters has continually surprised me.

I will admit a morbid curiousity about what his take on the Holocaust would have been.

=v= Yet another Alan Moore interview at The A.V. Club. Moore talks at length about his collaboration with Melinda Gebbie on Lost Girls, which has been so long in the making that I'd become a lost boy who'd lost track. (Apparently some of the collaborators' time was spent wooing each other.)

Apparently this is a very naughty graphic novel. Moore is by far my favorite comix/graphic novel writer, but could he and Gebbie possibly reach the erotic heights attained by Hunt Emerson's adaptation of Lady Chatterley's Lover?

(I’ve had a draft of this entry lying around for a month; Jym’s entry prompted me to finish it.)

I’ve had an advance order in for Alan Moore’s Lost Girls for a while. Moore states explicitly that it’s pornography; apparently, it’s arguably child pornography. As even illustrated child pornography violates federal law, there’s been concern from comics retailers about stocking and selling it. My own comic book pusher said:

Rory Root, Comic Relief - “Alan sells books. So do we…. the CBLDF would love to try a First Amendment case in Berkeley’s, or for that matter the Bay Area’s, Courts. Burton Joseph, legal counsel for the CBLDF, has said so in the past, though the ADA saw reason long before he had to officially weigh in on that instance. I suspect this book will end up in court. I don’t think it will be here.”

That the Great Ormond Street Hospital is considering legal action on the grounds that the book violates its perpetual copyright on Peter Pan was widely blogged, despite that claiming violation seems spurious.

Neil Gaiman wrote

It is one of the tropes of pure pornography that events are without consequence. No babies, no STDs, no trauma, no memories best left unexamined. Lost Girls, however, is all about consequences. It’s also about more things than sex — war, music, love, lust, repression and time, to pick a handful of subjects (I could pick more). It’s the kind of smut that would have no difficulty in demonstrating to an overzealous prosecutor that it has unquestionable artistic validity beyond its simple first amendment right to exist.

And I really wasn’t thinking about blogging any of this until I found this strange claim.

As Moore points out, there’s sexual subtext buried in the classics that inspired Lost Girls — Wendy has children at the end of Peter Pan, implying she’s had sex sometime during her life, and there’s even a reference to an orgy (last paragraph) in the original tale. OK, so maybe it’s more text than subtext.

It linked to the source, J.M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy.

In they went; I don’t know how there was room for them, but you can squeeze very tight in the Neverland. And that was the first of the many joyous evenings they had with Wendy. By and by she tucked them up in the great bed in the home under the trees, but she herself slept that night in the little house, and Peter kept watch outside with drawn sword, for the pirates could be heard carousing far away and the wolves were on the prowl. The little house looked so cosy and safe in the darkness, with a bright light showing through its blinds, and the chimney smoking beautifully, and Peter standing on guard. After a time he fell asleep, and some unsteady fairies had to climb over him on their way home from an orgy. Any of the other boys obstructing the fairy path at night they would have mischiefed, but they just tweaked Peter’s nose and passed on.

Hunh.

When you ask the On-line encyclopedia of integer sequences about 8 6 7 5 3 0 9, it promptly yields sequence A104175 — “From the words to the song “Jenny’s Letterbox” by Tommy Tutone.”

Try 4 8 15 16 23 42 and you get A104101 — “the Lost Numbers.” (Spoilers of sorts in the comments there.)

Just when you thought you’d seen everything, here’s a monkey riding a border collie.

My, I seem to have pretty much taken the summer off, without having had the good grace to announce it.

I’m going to get back to my posting very weekday except for when I don’t schedule. For starters, I’ll talk about Worldcon.

At first, I thought I mightn’t be able to go: Sunday before last, we realized one of our cats had an injured paw; on Monday, we learned he had a puncture wound and an infection, and would need antibiotics twice a day for a week. He’s a big strong cat, and Pocahontas wasn’t sure she’d be able to pill him herself.

I told my prospective Worldcon roommates of my plight, and one of them told me about Pill Pockets, little meat pouches you can hide drugs in to trick your cat into eating them. And they worked! My Worldcon was saved by exciting advances in meat technology!

It was my first Worldcon in a long time, and I had a great time. I’ll tell only one story for now.

Scene: A hotel room, at Worldcon. Enter CLIFF.

CLIFF: I met Walter Koenig.

ZED: Cool.

CLIFF: But I didn’t have with me the thing I specifically brought for him to sign, And it doesn’t have anything to do with Star Trek or Babylon 5.

ZED: Is it the script to the episode of Land of the Lost he wrote?

CLIFF: It’s the DVD case for the DVD of the Land of the Lost episode he wrote.

Cliff pulls the DVD from his luggage and displays it.

ZED: We are such big geeks.