Booknotes

Because I also do politics, I'm currently reading The Declaration of Independents: How Libertarian Politics Can Fix What's Wrong With America by Reason.tv's Nick Gillespie and Reason magazine's Matt Welch. Just to let you know how atypically well-written and culturally aware this is for a political book, there's a reference to Ilsa: She Wolf of the SS on page 23 of my advance copy.

Midnight link-o-rama

• Comic books on your TV: Showtime has announced it's picking up DC/Vertigo's 100 Bullets for a series. Meanwhile, Lucy Punch has been cast as the female lead, Deena Pilgrim, in FX's upcoming pilot Powers, based on the comics by Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Avon Oeming.
• If you think the Green Lantern movie we got is bad (and it is), just be glad we didn't end up with the proposed comedy version starring Jack Black. That nearly happened.
• Penn Badgley (Gossip Girl) has been cast as Jeff Buckley in the upcoming biopic.
• Things that will never happen: Drive and Bronson director Nicolas Winding Refn wants to make a Wonder Woman movie starring Mad Men's Christina Hendricks. (They'd probably just insist on changing the classic costume, since that's all the rage now, and putting pants on her, anyway.)
• The future of sex in video games.
• Deregulation in Japan leads to better beer.
• A former congressman, who wants his job back, writes a silly email to his constituents saying Green Lantern is a perfect role model for politicians. (Predictably, he cites, favorably, one of the most embarrassing, over-earnest examples of a 1970s comic book trying to be "relevant.")
• Doctor Who's Matt Smith is Batman... for a comedy stage production.
• Things that happen on the Internet every 60 seconds. [Graph]
• Why am I just now learning there is a grindhouse-movie-themed burger joint in Atlanta?

Monday Morning Videos

Lens Flare: The Movie

[Via The High Definite.]

Sunday mashup

Saturday afternoon link-o-rama

• J.D. Salinger's son wears rubber ears to fight an Italian Red Skull in the manufacture-on-demand DVD debut of 1990's Captain America. (So, does this mean we'll get a MOD DVD of the Nick Fury TV movie when The Avengers comes out next year?)
• Could Kickstarter be better than government grants for artists? (I also strongly suspect Kickstarter is better for the arts in general, never mind the artists.)
• The Twitter/Peanuts parody mashup @Peanutweeter has been taken down following complaints by Peanuts' copyright holder. This is another case of copyright gone copywrong.
• Tumblr site of the Day: Animals Being Dicks. (Your one-stop shop for all of your anthropomorphized animal hijinks.)
• More nerdrage aimed at DC's reboot/not-a-reboot of its superhero universe.
• Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark finally opens for real (not a preview! not an imaginary story!) on Broadway. It still sucks.
• Doctor Who meets A Softer World.
• Joe Bob Briggs on Rep. Weiner's wiener scandal. Related: Why Weiner's resignation is bad for America.
• America according to Twitter. [Graph]

Friday Night Videos

Red band trailer for 'Conan: The Barbarian'

More Conan the Barbarian in 3D Videos

Werner Herzog reads 'Go the F**k to Sleep' [NSFW]

Culture Shock 06.16.11: Let us now praise George Lazenby

Let us now praise a sort of famous man.

Of all the actors who have played James Bond on the big screen, one always gets short shrift.

No, I'm not including the various "James Bonds" of the farcical 1966 version of "Casino Royale." That would force me into a completely unnecessary digression about Woody Allen's turn as Jimmy Bond.

I'm talking about George Lazenby.

His tenure as 007 was brief, and his performance in that one Bond film is generally regarded as wooden, but of all the actors who every slid behind the wheel of 007's tricked-out Aston Martin, Lazenby is the toughest.

In his prime, he could probably take on Sean Connery, Roger Moore, Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig simultaneously. (I'm not sure about Timothy Dalton, though. Dalton has gotten really good at going full psycho in his most recent performances. I wouldn't put anything past him.)

You see, Lazenby actually has black belts in multiple martial arts and was friends with Bruce Lee. In a fight, he could probably hurt you.

When Connery, the man regarded by most 007 aficionados as the best Bond, retired from the super-spy franchise — temporarily, as it turned out — Lazenby became his unlikely successor. Not easy shoes to fill, especially if you are a model-turned-actor in his first movie role, which the Australian-born Lazenby was.

Despite Lazenby's bad rep, most of those same Bond aficionados will admit Lazenby's sole outing as 007, "On Her Majesty's Secret Service," is one of the strongest entries in the series. It features arguably the best Bond girl in Diana Rigg ("The Avengers") and Telly Savalas as arguably the best Blofeld.

If he'd stuck around, Lazenby could have grown into the role and become one of the best Bonds ever. Instead, he took probably the worst career advice ever and hung up his Walther PPK after just the one film.

After that, acting jobs became hard to find, and Lazenby returned to the Far East to make movies in Hong Kong and Australia, but not before a detour to Italy to make the 1972 thriller "Who Saw Her Die?" in which he plays a father searching for his daughter's killer and displays some acting chops absent from his Bond performance.

Back in Australia, Lanzenby appeared as the villain in 1975's "The Man from Hong Kong," the first feature film by Anglo-Australian director — and Quentin Tarantino favorite — Brian Trenchard-Smith ("BMX Bandits").

This is the movie that most sets Lazenby apart from other Bonds.

Not only does Lazenby do his own fight scenes, which include letting the hero, played by Yu Wang of "Master of the Flying Guillotine," beat him up, he also does his own stunts.

That includes being set on fire.

Unfortunately, "The Man from Hong Kong" isn't currently available in the U.S., but the Lazenby/ Yu Wang fight scene and the story behind it is one of the highlights of the recent documentary "Not Quite Hollywood," which chronicles the wild and dangerous world of 1970s and '80s Australia cinema.

How dangerous? Well, Lazenby ended up burning his arm doing that stunt. And, according to some accounts, he might have punched Trenchard-Smith afterward. (For the record, Lazenby says he doesn't remember punching his director, but if he did, he's sorry.) Actually, anyone who survived to talk about making movies in Australia in the '70s is probably a pretty tough guy. Trenchard-Smith had to set himself on fire before Lazenby would do it.

So, I'm not saying George Lazenby is the best James Bond. But I am saying he's definitely the 007 I'd want with me in a fight. And that deserves respect.

'Go the F**k to Sleep' as read by Samuel L. Jackson [NSFW]

Random video of the day

Midnight link-o-rama

• Tom Hanks is producing a six-season series for HBO based on Neil Gaiman's novel American Gods. (I think they're going to have to pad that out a bit. Maybe that will mean more nudity, 'cause this is HBO we're talking about.)
• A Utah NBC affiliate has said it will not air NBC's upcoming prime-time drama The Playboy Club.
• Some of Hollywood's biggest studios are considering opting out of this year's Comic Con, prompting speculation that Hollywood's love affair with all things geek may be coming to an end. Or not.
• Facebook's membership went down for the first time ever in May.
• Geeks are Sexy highlights Emma Frost cosplay pics. (Personally, I prefer the Red Sonja cosplayer in the top group shot, but I have a weakness for chain-mail bikinis.)
• Angry birds (crows) attack officers at a Seattle-area police department. Now that's a murder of crows.
• Hollywood studios are turning seven — seven! — board games — board games! — into movies. (You have may heard about the Battleship movie. They're adding aliens to it.) Also, show the original Clue! movie some respect!
• A Prisoner-themed band makes a Prisoner-themed video of a Prisoner-themed song. Too bad the song itself sucks. But, hey, Six of one, half a dozen of the other. Be seeing you.

30 years ago today...

On June 12, 1981, two filmmakers who had not yet ruined their reputations, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, teamed up to deliver an action-packed love letter to the 1940s movie serials they grew up with. The result was a film that remains in my personal top 5 to this day, which just goes to show there are some things you can possess that not even Kingdom of the Crystal Skull can take away. Happy 30th to the ultimate adventure movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark.

The best of my playlist

Chick Corea, Stanley Clarke and Lenny White, Forever

Al Di Meola, Pursuit of Radical Rhapsody

Hiromi, Voice

Book to go behind the scenes of 'The Room'

Greg Sestero, the guy who played Mark in the infamously bad movie The Room — "Hi, Mark!" — is writing a book about making "the Citizen Kane of Bad movies." Entertainment Weekly reports:

... [A]ctor Greg Sestero has just signed a deal with Simon & Schuster to detail his involvement in the notorious 2003 film-fiasco, The Room. Entitled Locked Inside 'The Room,' the tome will be co-penned by journalist Tom Bissell and is set for publication in 2013.

Also, if anyone reading this was in a bad movie, I'm entertaining offers to co-write a book about your experiences.

[EW link via MST3K's own Bill Corbett.]

Someone is remaking 'The Devil's Nightmare'

HorrorNews.net reports on an open casting call for a remake of the 1971 Eurohorror classic The Devil's Nightmare.

I consider the chances of this remake, now reportedly in pre-production, ever happening still very much in the air. The producers have a Kickstarter page set up to solicit funding, and they also have a Facebook page.

The original Devil's Nightmare is another one of the first Eurohorror films I ever saw. Like The Ghost Galleon, which I mentioned, coincidentally, in a post last night, I first encountered it on USA's late, lamented Saturday Nightmares show.

Remakes almost never turn out well, but I think I'd get a kick out of someone remaking a relatively obscure old favorite of mine like this.

Here's the spoileriffic trailer for the original:

Random video of the day

No time for a real post, so here's another random video. This time it's the trailer for The Ghost Galleon, the third film in the Blind Dead series. It's a lesser film in the series, and it has nothing on the original, Tombs of the Blind Dead, but it's a favorite of mine because it's one of the first Eurohorror films I ever saw, back when USA Network still aired Saturday Nightmares.

Random video of the day

From the early years of what used to be called the Sci-Fi Channel, when it was new and didn't mostly suck:

'Uncanny X-Men' canceled with issue No. 544

Thanks to the events of the upcoming Civil War 2 X-Men: Schism, Marvel is canceling Uncanny X-Men. Issue No. 544 is the end... at least until a bunch of new X-Men titles with new No. 1s come out.

As Comics Alliance notes, this, combined with DC's renumbering of its superhero titles, means the longest, continuously running comic published by either Marvel or DC is DC/Vertigo's Hellblazer, currently up to a heady issue No. 280.

Culture Shock 06.09.11: Sexting mishaps not just for teens

Not since the late Sen. Ted Stevens described the Internet as "a series of tubes," has a sitting congressman's misunderstanding of how the Internet works provided comedians — and lowly columnists like me — with so much material.

Oh, Anthony Weiner, where have you been all my life?

It's one thing for a politician to get caught up in an embarrassing sex scandal. It can even be a good career move. Exhibit A: former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer. As attorney general, he crusaded against prostitution. Four years later, he resigned the governorship after he was unmasked as Client 9 in a high-profile prostitution sting.

Did that keep Spitzer down? No way. You can watch him weeknights on CNN, which has got to be a better gig than dealing with the New York State Assembly day in, day out, especially now that he no longer has to share his time slot with former co-host Kathleen Parker.

But it's another thing to get caught in a sex scandal usually associated with teenagers.

That's just what Rep. Weiner has done.

He denied it to the bitter end. He now says it was a misguided joke.

But the fact is, Rep. Weiner's accidental public tweeting of a crotch shot of his own crotch, now public for all to see, is just the sort of thing adults have been warning kids about ever since cellphone cameras made it easy for teens to take their own — how to put it? — "self-portraits" and share them with friends.

You never know, for example, when a girlfriend might turn on you. But it'll probably happen after you cheat on her with her best friend. And then the ex will send that compromising picture of you not wearing pants to all of her friends, who now also hate you because you're a two-timing jerk. And the next thing you know, pictures of your junk are all over campus.

(No, this is not a personal story. We didn't have cellphones when I was in school. And the only embarrassing pictures of me in the public domain are the ones my "friends" have posted on Facebook, in which I always seem to be holding a bottle of PBR. People could easily get the wrong idea. They might think I'm an alcoholic or, worse still, a hipster.)

So, basically, Rep. Weiner didn't quite know how Twitter worked, and now what has been seen can't be unseen.

As it turns out, a couple of years ago, when psychologists and other people with too much time on their hands were fretting about teenagers ruining their college and job prospects by "sexting" naked pictures of themselves to each other, they should have been worried about the nation's lawmakers doing the same thing.

A hypocrisy-laden prostitution scandal is an adult scandal. That's what we expect of the alleged adults we elect to office. But a sexting scandal is a juvenile scandal.

How do you explain that to the wife?

UPDATE: Last week, I complained that DC Comics' forthcoming revamp of all of its superhero titles would probably mean the end of one of the company's few consistently good books, Grant Morrison's "Batman, Inc."

This week, DC announced that "Batman, Inc." will return next year. How this fits with DC's stated plans I can't guess, but I'll take all the good news I can.

DC 2011 = Image 1992

The previews of DC Comics' upcoming new titles posted this morning at io9.com are really hammering home an unmistakable impression:

The future of DC Comics sure looks a lot like the 1.0 version of Image Comics from way back in 1992.

This shouldn't be surprising since Image co-founder Jim Lee has been given the keys to DC's kingdom, but it's still startling how '90s retro some of these books look. And I'm not talking just about original Image/Wildstorm characters Grifter and Voodoo of WILDCats getting their own solo titles set in the mainstream nuDCU.

No, I mean Rob Liefeld is back, and he's illustrating a new Hawk & Dove series, which will allow him to showcase his primary artistic talents: drawing angry, misshapen, bulging men with huge chests and drawing anorexic, misshapen women with huge chests.

Marvel Civil War redux

Marvel Comics isn't hiding the fact that next month's big X-Men event, Schism, is the X-Men's version of Civil War. It's right there on the promotional art.

Did the X-Men feel left out last time? Is that what this is all about?

Who wants to bet money this whole thing sets up the return of Professor X and/or Jean Grey, who has to come in and set things right? Even money?

Wednesday (3 a.m.) link-o-rama

• A third Tron movie is moving forward, and Disney has hired a writer.
• Laurence Fishburne is leaving CSI.
• Kevin Smith is producing a reality series set in his comic-book shop for AMC. Think of it as Pawn Stars without the pawn or the stars.
• Fox has hired one of the writers of Fringe to script its Daredevil reboot. This already looks a lot more promising than the first Daredevil movie.
• Let's play the feud! Lost creator Damon Lindelof tweets that January Jones can't act. Drama follows.
• The Onion: "Dale Earnhardt Jr. Sick Of Everyone Assuming He's A Good Driver." (Ha!)
• Avoid the rush: Start hating MTV's Teen Wolf now.

Midnight link-o-rama

• A new trailer for the Fright Night remake is out, and this one finally gives us a reason to see it: former Doctor Who star David Tennant as magician/vampire hunter Peter Vincent.
• Let's play the feud! X-Men: First Class director Matthew Vaughn agrees with the consensus that X-Men: The Last Stand sucked, but Last Stand director Brett Ratner isn't taking that lying down. Ratner is fighting back by pointing out Last Stand made a boatload of money, which doesn't prove anything, actually, but whatever. First Class is still awesome, and Last Stand still sucks.
• Could Katie Couric's upcoming ABC daytime show mean the end of ABC's soon-to-be last standing soap, General Hospital?
• Columbia pictures is remaking Big Man Japan. This is a bad idea. Only the Japanese can make a movie this Japanese and this insane, and I mean that as the highest complement.
• Human Centipede Part 2 has been banned in the U.K. This reminds me how lucky I am to live in a country with a First Amendment, where I have the freedom not to see this movie of my own free will, thank you very much.
• DC reboot follow-up: The good news is, despite my fears, Grant Morrison's Batman Inc. will survive the reboot. It's scheduled to return in 2012. The bad news is this reboot is still tossing 25 years of character development out the window. I love Barbara Gordon as Batgirl as much as the next fanboy does, but there's a good case against putting her back in costume.

Also, how is keeping all of the recent Batman developments in continuity going to work with all of these other DC heroes getting rebooted and, in some cases at least, de-aged? Is Batman being to become the old man of the DC universe compared to everyone else? This reboot crap makes my head hurt.

MTV: Still not killing the culture no matter how much it sucks now

Are they the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, or do they just

suck?

So, The Twilight Saga: Eclipse won, like, a third of the awards at last night's MTV Movie Awards.

(That one-third figure is an estimate. I haven't had enough coffee yet for basic math. Here, you can add it up yourself.)

Between that and the baleful influence of Jersey Shore, I have become what I once hated. I've become one of those stodgy adults who thinks MTV is killing Western Civilization as we know it.

Nearly 30 years after MTV debuted, we've come full circle. Only now, instead of sexy videos ruining the culture, it's just endless crap: Team Edward, Team Jacob, Team Guido. Granted, I am aware that my sense of MTV-induced societal collapse is entirely a figment of my imagination, just as it was illusory when parents, pundits, and professional bedwetters complained about MTV back in the 1980s and early '90s.

But at least I have an appreciation now for why all of those anti-MTV voices felt the way they did: It was an aesthetic thing.

Here's my hypothesis: MTV's critics thought the music videos MTV played back then were raunchy, and, besides that, they hated the music, anyway. So, anything that aesthetically displeasing had to be bad for you.

Similarly, I look at a network that airs Jersey Shore and celebrates Twilight, and a little voice in my head tells me this insipid crap must be dumbing down the culture.

It doesn't matter that there's no empirical evidence for that. It doesn't matter that TV, overall, is more complex and requires more viewer investment than ever before. (TV shows from TV's "golden age" are really pretty simple. Compare Gunsmoke to Lost.) It doesn't matter that all of the stats show that pathologies like teen pregnancy and teen crime have been going down over the past 30 years. That voice in the back of my head won't shut up.

It's a hard lesson to learn, but it's important: Just because it's crap doesn't mean it's actually bad for you.

This means something ... maybe [Doctor Who speculation]

The totally stylish eye patch worn by Madame Kovarian (Frances Barber) in the new episode of Doctor Who, "A Good Man Goes to War" ...

... looks a lot like the eye patch worn by Bette Davis' character in the 1968 Hammer thriller The Anniversary ...

Coincidence? Homage? Or something more meaningful.
Time will tell. It always does. Except when it doesn't.

Markets in Everything: Doctor Who Edition

Because you never know when you might need an "exterminator," now you can own your own Dalek, and it'll set you back just $5,000 U.S.

The voice of horror

Two great things about this TV commercial for The Amityville Horror: First, it ends with "Now playing at a theater or drive-in near you." When was the last time a movie ad said anything about drive-ins? Exactly. Second, the voice-over announcer is the late, great Percy Rodrigues, aka the "voice of horror."

Rodrigues also had a long career in front of the camera, including guest roles in genre programs like Star Trek, The Man from UNCLE, Mission: Impossible, Planet of the Apes (the TV series), and The Starlost.

Probably his most memorable vocal performance, however, was as the Loknar in Heavy Metal.

Saturday midday link-o-rama

• Just how closely should comic-book movies follow the source material, anyway?
• How strong is the will to believe? Just ask the admitted hoaxers who can't get people to believe they're hoaxers.
• The newest "supercut" of an overused movie line: "You just don't get it, do you?" 8 min. [Video]
• 40 things that will make you feel old.
• Some U.S. senators are reportedly considering legislation that would make it a crime to embed copyright-infringing YouTube videos.

Steel yourself for the ultimate Shaq attack!

Now that Shaq had retired from basketball, maybe he'll have time to give us the sequel we've all been waiting for.

Space Girl [Music Video]

This music video depicting the progression of female characters in science fiction over the past 60-odd years is too cool to pass up. (Warning: A couple of seconds of totally unexpected brief nudity pops up at 1:28, so possibly NSFW.)



[Via Geeks are Sexy.]

Random YouTube of the Day

It's the same, except longer

Someone else has probably had this realization, but it just dawned on me the other day when I was pondering all of the many, many things I hate about the yearlong, universe-spanning, company-wide crossovers Marvel and DC insist in inflicting upon would-be causal comics readers like me.

Remember how during the Silver Age and Bronze Age, it was really popular to have some superheroes meet, get into a fight because of some sort of misunderstanding/mind control/etc., and then eventually resolve their differences so that they could team up against the real villain? It happened all the time. (Especially if you were the Hulk. So many misunderstandings....)

That's basically the exact same story arc you get when you combine Marvel's Civil War and Secret Invasion. The heroes choose sides, face off against each other, and later join forces to battle the real enemy, the Skrulls, who had been manipulating events behind the scenes the whole time.

Only in the old days, it took one issue (maybe two) to tell that story. Now, it takes Marvel something like three years to tell the same damn tale.

Decompressed storytelling has definitely gone too far.

The anarchist politics of 'Watchmen'

From the archives: An article I wrote in 2009 (commissioned by Young Americans for Liberty) on the politics of Alan Moore's Watchmen, the movie version of which was just arriving in theaters around that time.

Friday afternoon link-o-rama

• Malcolm McDowell hated how he killed Capt. Kirk in Star Trek: Generations as much as everyone else did.
• Popular web comic Penny Arcade to become an animated feature at Paramount, kinda sorta.
• Class of 2011: If social media were a high school [infographic].
• Fan-made animated short pits The Doctor against Daleks and Cybermen anime-style.
• The streamlined DC Universe will still have too many damn Green Lantern titles.

Markets in Everything: Episode VI: Slave Leia Bikini Car Wash

I think it was Marginal Revolution blogger/economist Tyler Cowen who first started documenting the phenomenon of "markets in everything," but ever since, I have been on the lookout for markets in everything geeky. And so, I give you the Slave Leia car wash. (Follow the link* for more and larger pics. Link via Geeks Are Sexy.)

* I have removed the link because it now goes to some sort of malware page. (FH, 19 Dec. 2015)

James Arness, RIP

Actor James Arness has died, reports Deadline Hollywood's Nikki Fink. Arness was 88.

Although best known for his long-running role as Marshal Matt Dillon on TV's Gunsmoke for 20 seasons (1955-1975), Arness is also known among sci-fi fans as the original "Thing" in 1951's The Thing from Another World, aka The Thing.

Arness' younger brother, Mission: Impossible star Peter Graves, died last year at 83.

Culture Shock 06.02.11: Batman, Superman get the reboot

The rebooted Justice League of America.

(Image courtesy of DC Comics.)

Superheroes have never been more popular, with four big-budget superhero movies hitting screens this year. But the comic books that gave birth to those heroes are in desperate shape.

Sales of monthly comics are taking such a beating you'd think they'd made the Hulk angry, and the only bright spot has been an increase in sales of trade paperbacks collecting those same monthly comics. The two major publishers, Marvel and DC, have waded into digital comics, but neither has really taken the plunge.

Until now.

DC Comics made two announcements Tuesday. The first is, starting Aug. 31, DC will release digital editions of its comics on the same day the print versions go on sale. In a world of iPads and Kindles, that was bound to happen, and you can bet DC's chief rival, Marvel Comics, won't be far behind in making the same move.

The second announcement, however, is more baffling. It's a sign of desperation.

DC is rebooting its entire superhero universe. No one is safe. Not Superman. Not Batman. Not Wonder Woman. All of the company's superhero comics are going back to square one, which includes each of them getting a brand new issue No. 1.

But that's just the window dressing. Inside, familiar characters will be younger, their costumes altered. (They're intent on making Wonder Woman wear pants.) DC is, if not going back to the beginning, at least turning back the clock.

Apparently, DC's powers that be — primarily Chief Creative Officer Geoff Johns and Co-Publishers Jim Lee and Dan DiDio — have decided they've done such a lousy job of running DC Comics for the past several years that the only thing to do is blow up their superhero universe and start over.

They're half right about that. Virtually the only readable DC superhero comic of the past decade, apart from an occasional gem like Paul Cornell's "Knight and Squire" miniseries, has been Grant Morrison's "Batman," which actually did something remarkable: It changed the status quo.

But changing the status quo is unforgivable when it comes to corporate-owned superheroes.

Morrison had a similarly adventurous run on Marvel's "New X-Men" in the early aughts, which Marvel promptly undid the moment Morrison jumped to DC. (Joss Whedon's followup, "Astonishing X-Men," was in some ways better, but it was also decidedly old school.)

Now, it looks like Morrison's hard work on Batman, which has included making the new Robin a son Batman never knew he had, is about to get rebooted into oblivion. (Maybe not, but I don't see how it squares with DC's announced plans.)

But as bad as most of DC's non-Morrison books have become, is wiping the slate clean, or almost clean, the answer? I guess it is if all you're comfortable doing is rehashing the same old stories: A new retelling of Superman's origin, with some new but pointless wrinkle?

How nice. I haven't seen that before.

DC has been rebooting its heroes every few years for the past 25 years. The only difference this time is they say they really, really mean it this time. For a promise of something new, it sure seems familiar.

Marvel has its own storytelling troubles, but at least it's trying.

With Marvel, it's typically the execution that undermines otherwise OK ideas.

But DC's reboot is just an old idea dressed up to look new. But at least you can read DC's new comics on an iPad. That way you can reboot them yourself.

Culture Shock 05.26.11: Tamed Internet still has bizarre territories

In the early days of the World Wide Web, before anyone really knew what to do with it, people would create Web pages for just about anything.

It was easy. Do-it-yourself websites were all the rage. And strange, bizarre, yet sometimes wonderful pages sprouted up all over the Internet, usually on free sites like the late, lamented Geocities, where garishly bad Web design became something of an art form and half of the pages always said they were "under construction," no matter how old they were.

These pages often were devoted to celebrities, obscure television shows, childhood toys and the like.

Some are still around, but they've grown up and gotten professional.

Some of the rest have migrated to social networks. For instance, there's a Facebook page devoted to Burger Chef, a hamburger chain that all-but faded from existence in the mid-1980s. Then there's another Facebook page just for vintage newspaper advertisements for drive-in movies. And that's just to name two that conform to my own strange and bizarre interests.

Still, even outside of Facebook, you will sometimes run across a site that's devoted to something so odd it seems like it fell through a time warp from the Web's early days — except it's better designed, because nothing, and I mean nothing, not even MySpace, will ever be as poorly designed as those Geocities pages were. Bless their hearts.

Recently, I've stumbled upon three websites so specific in their subject matter you really have to wonder about the people who created them.

The first is House's Canes at http://www.earthimmigrant.net/housescanes/home.html.

It is, as you might guess, devoted to all of the various canes TV's most acerbic doctor, Gregory House, has used over the course of seven seasons of "House."
This site is full of stats. It tells you when a particular cane first appeared, how many episodes it appeared in, and, if known, what happened to it.

My favorite is the Walnut Derby cane, which lasted 20 episodes until Wilson sawed it in half — season 2, episode 16 — to get revenge for one of House's pranks. I even own a replica.

Currently, House is using a Rosewood Tourist cane, which he's had since season 6, episode 4, making it the longest-serving cane so far.

Yet this is the least bizarre of the three websites in question.

Next on the list is The Cosby Sweater Project at http://thecosbysweaterproject.tumblr.com.

Again, as the name suggests, this site is obsessed with the many sweaters Bill Cosby and the other cast members wore on Cosby's venerable 1980s sitcom "The Cosby Show."

That's all it is. Seriously.

But at least Cosby's sweaters were kind of a running joke at the time.

Our final website's obsession, however, is so far out there not even the truth is out there.

And that's the segue into Fox Mulder's Wristwatch, found at http://foxmulderswristwatch.com and billed as "The Internet's most comprehensive examination of the watches worn by Fox Mulder on TV's ‘The X-Files'."

Indeed.

This is my new favorite website ever. Fox Mulder's Wristwatch wins the award for the most random topic ever to have a website devoted to it.

(Don't try to top it. You'll just be wrong.) And in case you're wondering, there are at least 12 different models documented so far, including everything from an Omega Quartz De Ville Prestige to a Casio digital, meaning, at some point, Mulder thought digital watches were a pretty neat idea.

This was the reason the Internet was invented. It's not about national security or commerce or education or even naughty pictures. (OK, it's partly about naughty pictures.) It's about the freedom of someone to share with the entire world an obsession with a TV character's timepieces.

Culture Shock 05.19.11: It's the end of the world as we know it (again)

Maybe you haven't heard, but Saturday is the end of the world.

Not the end of the world exactly, but it is the supposed date of the Rapture, after which all of us left behind on Earth will be in for a really nasty time, culminating in the real end of the world on Oct. 21.

That's the prediction of Harold Camping, the 89-year-old president of the Family Radio network. You may have seen one of his billboards proclaiming that the end of days is upon us.

It's hard to tell for sure, but Camping seems to have developed a following, even though he doesn't exactly have a good track record when it comes to forecasting Judgment Day.

Twenty years ago, Camping predicted the world would end in 1994. (Oops.) Camping, naturally, can explain in great detail why he got it wrong then and why he has it right this time. He's sure Saturday is the day.

"It is going to happen," he told National Public Radio. "There is no Plan B."

Technically speaking, this is Plan B. Plan A was in 1994. The real question is, is there a Plan C?

But I don't want to dwell on Camping. Lots of people have foretold the end of the world, using both religious and secular arguments. And they all have one thing in common: They've all been spectacularly wrong so far.

The new book "Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Are Next to Worthless, and You Can Do Better" by Dan Gardner is mostly about the futility of trying to predict the future in general.

But Gardner does spice it up by recalling some of the more notable doomsday predictions of the past century. Y2K, anyone?

There's Marian Keech, a psychic who predicted the end of the world would come Dec. 21, 1955. Then there's Paul R. Ehrlich, the famed biologist who claimed in his still-influential 1968 book "The Population Bomb" that the world would fall into starvation and chaos by the 1980s. Since he wrote, the world's population has nearly doubled, but the percentage of the world's undernourished has more than halved over the same period, according to the United Nations.

(Oops, again.)

Keech is all but forgotten, but Ehrlich is unrepentant and still regarded, by many, as a credible expert.

The 1970s were a particularly fruitful time for doomsday predictions, Gardner notes. Hal Lindsey's "The Late Great Planet Earth" was the decade's top-selling book.

In the '70s, as now, people were worried about inflation, unemployment, the price of gasoline and tensions in the Middle East.

When the world seems chaotic, people crave knowledge about the future, even if that knowledge is all doom and gloom. It's a behavior that seems to be hard-wired into our brains.

Even if we get past this weekend unscathed, we still have 2012 to deal with.

Based on a misrepresentation of the Mayan calendar, some people claim that the world will end Dec. 21, 2012.

If Dec. 21 seems like a popular day for doomsday, that's probably because it's the winter solstice, which people have regarded for thousands of years as symbolic of transition and rebirth.

But actually the Mayan calendar doesn't "end" in 2012. It just cycles back to its beginning, which is what our calendar does every December.

That's how calendars work, and there's nothing special about it. The Earth orbits the sun, heedless to how we humans keep count.

The world will end someday. Maybe in 5 billion years when the sun runs out of fuel, expands and burns the planet to a cinder. Maybe we'll be flung out into deep space when our galaxy merges with the Andromeda galaxy in an estimated 3 to 5 billion years. Or maybe we'll go out the old fashioned way, done in by an asteroid, just like the dinosaurs.

But if I were you, I'd still plan on going to work Monday — unless you have a really good Plan B.

Culture Shock 05.12.11: Charlie Sheen is a violent 'Wraith' of truth

Let's go back to a simpler time — long before "Two and a Half Men," before the "goddesses" and before the "Violent Torpedo of Truth" tour — a time when Charlie Sheen was just an actor.

No, keep going. Before "Hot Shots!" and "Major League." Before "Navy SEALs" and "Wall Street."

I'm taking about going back to one of Sheen's earliest starring roles, the vengeful spirit in 1986's "The Wraith."

Re-released last year as a "special edition" DVD and currently available free online at Hulu.com, "The Wraith" is one of those movies that really takes you back — assuming you grew up in the 1980s and once thought mullets were kinda cool.

Sheen plays Jake, a stranger who rides into town on his bike and, with a sly grin, quickly earns the affection of Keri, played by Sherilyn Fenn before she hit it big with "Twin Peaks" and "Two Moon Junction."

She's the pretty girl who works at the local burger joint, which, as far as I can tell, is this sleepy Arizona town's major employer.

But there's just one problem: Keri is seeing — dating isn't the right word — the local tough guy, Packard, played by multitalented actor/writer/director Nick Cassavetes.

Packard has a thing for switchblades and wild mood swings. He also has a thing for Keri, although she's not particularly interested in his thing.

Otherwise, Packard and his gang have a good thing going — street racing, grand theft auto and a profitable chop shop — until the "Wraith" comes along and starts picking off Packard's crew one by one.

Driving his all-black "Turbo Interceptor" (actually a customized Dodge M4S prototype) and wearing a black costume topped-off with a huge helmet, the Wraith looks like a cross between a Power Ranger and a member of Daft Punk. But he also carries a big gun, which counts for something.

You know, Jake and the Wraith showed up at the same time. Could they be the same guy? Hmm.

Yeah, I'm not giving anything away by saying Jake is actually a ghost who has come back in a different body to take revenge on the guys who killed him. Basically, it's the same plot as "High Plains Drifter," only without the cowardly townsfolk. That means Sheen and Clint Eastwood have something in common besides "The Rookie."

Rounding out the cast are Clint Howard as Rughead, the gang's nerdy tech genius, and Randy Quaid — the only man in Hollywood with a more bizarre personal life than Sheen's — as Sheriff Loomis.

Most of the fun of "The Wraith" comes from its nostalgia value and the comic relief provided by Packard's dimwitted gang, particularly the unfortunately named Skank and Gutterboy. Charlie doesn't really have a lot to do, apart from riding around looking cool and making out with Fenn, which is nice work if you can get it.

The Scotti Brothers Records soundtrack (unfortunately out of print) is like an Ultimate '80s playlist, featuring Ozzy Osbourne, Robert Palmer, Bonnie Tyler and Billy Idol, as well as Scotti Brothers regulars Lion and Stan Bush, who also show up on the 1986 "Transformers: The Movie" soundtrack.

So, if you're old enough to have ever worn a Members Only jacket unironically, "The Wraith" is a good way to relive your glory days.

Or if you only know Charlie Sheen as a "high priest Vatican assassin warlock," you might think a movie where he spends 90 minutes killing douchebags is a pretty neat idea. In any case, it's better than "Two and a Half Men."