What if Mr. T kicked George Lucas's ass?

I'm writing not to say that I liked the newest Star Wars movie, which I did, but rather to say something snide about George Lucas. Perhaps this seems unfair, picking on the man whether he makes a good movie or not, but I don't feel fair.
What I have to say is this:
Remember when George Lucas carelessly started fucking up his movies from twenty years ago, inserting lots of bad computer generated images and then refusing to let anyone see the originals again? That sure was crazy and mean of him, huh?
Mr. Lucas claims it as his prerogative to alter his earlier work, adding what he says he wanted to include before but was unable to due to the constraints of budget and technology.
Granting him this, it seems fair to ask whether ten years from now he will try altering The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones to make up for their inadequacies in plot, writing, and acting, inadequacies due to the constraint of Mr. Lucas being a talentless hack.

I also write to wish Mr. T a happy 53rd birthday. God bless you, Mr. T, you make our world a better place.
(If you have not read Mr. T's interview in this month's Wizard magazine, you must. It includes the words "Superman never went to the school to tell the kids not to do drugs. Mr. T does that all the time.")

Thoughts on Dave Matthews Band

In a now famous incident, the Dave Matthews Band tour bus dumped 800 pounds of excrement into the Chicago River in August of 2004. It is a particularly ugly coincidence (a coincidence that may perhaps be viewed as a metaphor for what Dave Matthews Band and its music have perpetrated on our culture) that the excrement happened to fall onto a passing vessel, Chicago's Little Lady, raining on the heads of roughly a hundred tourists in the middle of a cruise. The state of Illinois has filed a lawsuit against the band seeking damages in the amount of $70,000.

Syllogism the First-
1. Dave Matthews Band got its start in Charlottesville, and, it may be assumed, enjoyed the support of the residents of that city.

2. Charlottesville is a college town centered around the University of Virginia (of Charlottesville's population of roughly 40,000 people, roughly 30,000 attend or are employed by the University).

3. A large number of people associated with the University of Virginia like the Dave Matthews Band.

Syllogism the Second-
1. A large number of people at the University of Virginia like the Dave Matthews Band.

2. The Dave Matthews Band not only releases album after album of spectacularly awful music but also dumps shit on people.

3. Standards at the University of Virginia are perhaps not as high as we are led to believe.

Does Knowledge Breed Ass-Sex?

Two excerpts from two different articles, both published in the New York Times in the last week:

In Kansas, Darwinism Goes on Trial Once More

By JODI WILGOREN
May 6, 2005

TOPEKA, Kan., May 5 - Six years after Kansas ignited a national debate over the teaching of evolution, the state is poised to push through new science standards this summer requiring that Darwin's theory be challenged in the classroom.

In the first of three daylong hearings being referred to here as a direct descendant of the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee, a parade of Ph.D.'s testified Thursday about the flaws they saw in mainstream science's explanation of the origins of life. It was one part biology lesson, one part political theater, and the biggest stage yet for the emerging movement known as intelligent design, which posits that life's complexity cannot be explained without a supernatural creator.


Gay and Straight Men React Differently to Sexual Odors

By NICHOLAS WADE
May 9, 2005

Using a brain-imaging technique, Swedish researchers have shown that men and women respond differently to two odors that may be involved in sexual arousal, and that homosexual men respond in the same way as women.

The two chemicals, one a testosterone derivative produced in men's sweat and the other an estrogen-like compound found in women's urine, have long been suspected of being pheromones, chemicals emitted by one individual to trigger some behavior in another of the same species. The role of pheromones, particularly in guiding sexual behavior, has been well established in animals but experts differ as to what importance, if any, they have retained in human mating.

The new research may open the way to studying human pheromones as well as the biological basis of sexual preference. The study, by Dr. Ivanka Savic and colleagues at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, is being reported in Tuesday's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

I wondered after reading these two articles whether conservative factions of our country would be trying to tear down science if it perhaps told them more that they wanted to hear.
That thought led me to imagine a nightmare world (part Fahrenheit 451, part 1984) where there is no Left, no science, and the country is run by the Christian Right. In that futuristic world of horse-drawn carriages, home-churned butter and Lawrence Welk, the nation's most renowned "scientists" will get their "degrees" from Bob Jones "University," and conduct studies linking abortion to the melting of the polar ice caps.
In this world I imagine myself re-named "Chocolate Flava," after the book I have chosen to memorize and pass down to posterity. I try to escape to the woods to live in peace with the other Satan-kissing literate slimeballs, but I am hounded by police, who I imagine will be dressed like the Spanish Inquisition in the Monty Python skit and are led by my boss, Paula. I will be caught, and after extended torture and interogation, executed in some sort of barbaric way, possibly stoned, possibly burnt alive. With my death, Zane is lost to future generations.

I Write a Joke

I like to tell jokes, and do so often to mixed reviews. Unfortunately, my repetoire is limited, usually by memory rather than taste. Everyone I know has heard me tell "Mickey talks to his divorce attorney" five thousand and one times, and even with my devastatingly effective use of a Mickey Mouse voice on the line "I didn't say she was crazy, I said she was fucking Goofy," it wears thin. Likewise the pun about the guy who has his wife killed in the grocery store (Artie chokes two for a dollar at Food Lion), the one about Jesus being well hung, and even the one about the opposite of Christopher Reeve being Christopher Walken. In an effort to inject some much needed life into my joke repertoire I have written my first original joke. I like it very much, and what it lacks in actual humor it makes up for with misdirection and a literary reference that makes me look borderline well-read.


An elephant walks into a bar.
The bartender says, "What? Get out of here! Goddamn, there's an elephant in my bar. Shoo!"
The elephant tramples the bartender, not out of any malice but just because it's an elephant and it doesn't know better.
Then George Orwell shows up, a crowd of expectant Indians trailing behind him, and shoots the thing.
A wonderful essay is written.

the end