Explanations of past biliousness, electronic updates, and dim movie night prospects

I am not simply bile on a stick.

I say that because I don’t want to confuse anyone with my occasional shots at WTF. I have nothing against camps in general, or this camp in particular, or the people who attend it or the people who run it. I went to camp myself once; it was between 4th and 5th grade, and I broke my arm and got sent home after a week, although I’ve worn the scars for life. My thing about WTF is more of a Spidey issue. That is, with great power comes great responsibility. As their website has de facto become LD Central, when they go off on a toot it has effects far beyond what they are intending. With the camp, they’re merely connecting with attendee friends and family, but co-opting LD Central to do it makes them look slightly venal, as if they’re devoting the site to drumming up business for themselves. And when they’re giving microsecond-by-microsecond reports from national events, it overburdens those events with a weight and importance that they don’t deserve. I’ve always maintained that the WTF folks need to atomize these activities on the site. That is, it’s fine to do it if they want to, i.e., there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with it, but don’t give over the whole site to this coverage. In a word, some of us don’t care, and it undermines the real cultural value of the site to devote so much real estate to items of such parochial interest. Unfortunately, when they did atomize the site last year by breaking off the three pieces that now reside under the fold, they simply lost those pieces to twilight zone. Bottom line: if anyone is going to be LD Central, the crack heads of WTF are fine folks I’m perfectly willing to accept. But I wish they’d come to terms with their centrality and separate the wheat from the chaff just a little bit better. Not so much that I can’t continue to rib them, but enough that I’m more willing to check the site more regularly.

Of course, if they wanted to, they could fire back whatever shots they want across the bow of yours truly. It’s not like I don’t have my own little peccadilloes. For instance, the new microphone arrived, and it seems to work fine, although it’s not as sensitive as I expected. Or, more likely, I haven’t figured out quite how to set it up yet. It’s a cute old devil, though. Looks like a real mike. It words fine with Audacity. Then I had all sorts of frolicking fun trying to figure why the last iTunes feed didn’t take. Finally I went to some site that analyzes your feed and tells you line for line what’s wrong, and found that the code I had added to meet Apple’s new category requirement wasn’t working correctly. It looked fine to me, but what can I say? I deleted it, pinged the feed, and we were back in business. I’ll put another new Nostrum up in a day or two so you can hear the difference in mikes (if you’re one of the pathetic few who actually listen to this nonsense). And, of course, I’ll use it for the next parts of Caveman that I’ll be recording.

And by the way, when did mike become mic? I never did get the memo on that one. So I’ll ignore it. Jeesh.

Meanwhile, I’ve been thinking about movies lately, and the fact that I simply can’t get myself to go to one. And I don’t think the problem is me. Look at what’s playing at my local Cineplex: Cars, The Devil Wears Prada, The Lake House, Pirates of the Caribbean, Click, Garfield, Nacho Libre, Superman Returns. Now, I’ll buy the disk of Cars eventually because I like Pixar films and usually enjoy all their extras; if I had a kid around, I’d go see it now on the big screen, but I don’t so I won’t. Prada is a rental from the getgo; why pay movie money to see a glorified sitcom? All the reviews of Keanu meets Sandra (oh joy, oh rapture, they’re reunited) make it sound like the Korean original would be better, and that’s not saying much, but again, a rental from the getgo as it might pass a couple of hours inoffensively. And speaking of remakes, didn’t I already see Pirates? I’m as big a J. Depp fan as there is, but I’ve already done my two and a half hours of Jack Sparrow. As for the idea of paying any money at all for Adam Sandler, well, that is inconceivable; until he starts paying me to see his movies, and paying me a lot, it’s just not going to happen. Obviously Garfield is not aimed at me. And the Jack Black sounds like yet another rental; given my opinion of N Dynamite, I’m not holding my breath, but I am a JB fan, so a year from now I’ll report back. Which leaves Superman, which has the benefit of presumably having good effects worth seeing on the big screen, but the reviews make it sound mopey. I mean, if I were the Man of Steel, I would get over it, whatever it is. You’re the Man of Steel, for pete’s sake. What more do you need? And Lois Lane has a baby? Not Clark’s? The whole point of the Superman fantasy is that it is angst-free, unlike the point of the Batman angst, which is that it is fantasy-free (I won’t go into the Marvel universe here, which is another thing altogether). Superman should be fun. We all should fly and be invulnerable and look different when we take off our glasses. End of story. And the whole idea that the original (so to speak) Superman film with Chris Reeve is some sort of canon on the old Kryptonian? Come on. That was a dull film with some fun moments. Supe 2 was the only truly good one of the series. Revering Supe 1 is like revering Star Trek: The Motionless Picture (as Harlan E was the first to call it). It wasn’t good. Deal with it.

So, given this unattractive menu of choices, I end up staying home, but I may bite the (faster-than-a-speeding) bullet and do Superman Thursday, just to get out of the house for an evening of air conditioning. No doubt I’ll marginally enjoy it, but ultimately feel I coulda stayed home and prayed for a Firefly revival.