spinline.net: The Blog

With this post, I will hereby attempt rectify the severe case of spinline.net The Blog withdrawal that I have undoubtedly subjected my legions of readers to the past so-and-so months. So hop in, strap yourselves in, and let’s GO, BABY!

• So first off, head to Conservative Donnybrook for my thoughts on Harry Reid and the upcoming crash in China.
• John Siracusa posts a Mac-geek-licious retrospective of his decade of epic reviews of Mac OS X releases, dating back to the early developer previews. It’s weird to think of those early days of the Return of Jobs, when the jury was still out on whether the Mac as a platform could survive at all, the success of the adorable new iMac notwithstanding. “Classic” Mac OS was very, very long in the tooth and extremely crash-prone, as I can recall from bitter experience. It annoys me just thinking back on it. GRRRR! But the success of the upcoming OS X was hardly assured, and it did seem plenty ambitious, slow, and resource-hungry at the time. Anyway, glad it all worked out.
• So Sam Raimi and Tobey McGuire are out of the Spider-Man franchise, and the whole thing is going to be rebooted. No Spider-Man 4 in 2011. Well, this strikes me as a pretty horrible move for the studio. But still, Spider-Man 3 was pretty disappointing, and maybe there wasn’t much left in the tank, so perhaps it’s for the best to get a fresh take on the franchise, even if it doesn’t have much of a chance of matching the success of Raimi’s. Anyway, as long as I’m feeling all nostalgic, I’ll tell a little story. The first time I heard anything about Raimi’s Spider-Man was when the preview came on before The Phantom Menace — opening night, midnight showing. It was awesome, and it blew everyone in the audience away. Every geek in that audience, including me, sat spellbound through that trailer. At the end, McGuire’s voiceover went, “Who am I? I’m Spiderman.” The logo flashed up on the screen, the music pumped, and the theater erupted in cheers. It was really an electrifying moment of mass communal geek bliss. That trailer was definitely the high point of the evening, given what a pile of horseshit Episode I turned out to be.
• Bob Murphy notes that Adolph Hitler doesn’t show up in the list of suggestions that drops down on the Google home page when you type in a search. Steve Sailer discovers another name Google doesn’t seem to recognize: Pat Buchanan!
• That’s all for now, bye!

Hilarious!

On a whim, I decided that it would be good to know what, besides The Monkees and Huey Lewis and the News, happened in 20th century music, so I queued up a Philip Glass station on my Pandora Radio.

Based on under two hours of listening, I officially declare avant-garde music to have gotten a bad rap. Glass is eminently listenable!

I’m also struck by how a lot of movie scores seem to have been influenced by Glass or minimalism in general. I’m thinking of music from The Remains of the Day and Jon Brion’s score for Magnolia.

In other news, a lovely Debussey track called Arabesque No. 1 came up, but I couldn’t keep from being reminded of Jack Horkheimer, Star Hustler, a cheesy old public television show that used that piece as its theme. It ran on our PBS station in the 80s. Does anybody else remember that show? No? OK.

‘Cause here it is again! Man, I love YouTube.

Now, I was going to try to head off any needling about the geekiness of having ever watched this show with the defense that I have only ever seen it because it came on right after… Doctor Who.

(Sigh.)

Here: it’s a Slate dialogue on the historical merits of “W” with Oliver Stone, Ron Suskind, Bob Woodward, and Jacob Weisberg.

South Park on the election.

This is a pretty good one, it’s mudslinging in the Lando vs. The Emperor contest.

I like how one of Lando’s backdrops is a photo of a DC Metro station. They do look kind of science-fictioney.

Top ten stupid things Americans say to Brits.

I saw “W” and Dan McCarthy is basically right; it’s “like sitting through a not-very-funny, two-hour-long ‘Saturday Night Live’ sketch without Tina Fey.” Everything (and everyone) was pretty cartoonish, and all the standard anti-Bush bullet points were dutifully checked off: waterboarding, check. “Is our children learning,” check. Yellowcake, check. Cheney’s lust for oil and Empire, check. “Misunderestimated,” check.

It’s not even that I couldn’t ever buy, even if only in a suspension-of-disbelief way, the movie’s basic premise, that W was driven to become president to prove himself to Bush Sr, and that the Iraq War fiasco was a product of his complicated relationship with Bush Sr. as well as the machinations of evil neocons. It’s just that this particular movie is clumsy, plodding, dumb, and boring.

The vibe from the audience in the theater was a little weird. The film tries to humanize Bush and get the audience to empathize with him to some extent. But most in the audience seemed to be pretty amped up for lots of anti-Bush red meat which the movie failed to deliver consistently, leading to some loud, almost forced laughter and jeers in parts that were supposed to be dramatic rather than satirical, like the scene with W’s near-fistfight with Dad. I guess loud laughter at inappropriate moments in movies is kind of a pet peeve of mine, but I didn’t mind too much this time because the movie itself wasn’t exactly holding me spellbound.

One thing that struck me is that just like in real life, Colin Powell got off real easy in this movie. He was portrayed as the voice of reason, courage, and sanity among all the warmongering and recklessness of the Cheney-led neocons, but his ultimate decision to stick it out and back the Administration, right through to his famous presentation to the U.N. Security Council, is glossed over without much examination. But, of course, he was the only one in the Administration who was positioned to end up looking good no matter what the outcome of the war. Not an accident!

Here’s the Southern Avenger’s take.

P.S. this is the banner from whitehouse.gov’s 2003 Web package of Powell’s presentation. Prophetic, right?