Three things about Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. First, a big reason that it's so much fun is that everyone's actually likable. Which is an exciting new idea for reality television.

Second, Tom with the long hair? I hated his haircut. I'm all for the long hair (and I thought it was hysterical that the guys could not stop playing with his hair) but the layers seemed like too much. It's possible I'm just jealous of his hair, because I am.

And finally: I love Ted. I'm kind of sad that he doesn't get to interact with the, um, helpee? as much as most of the others, since he just does a quick cooking lesson near the end. Maybe in some shows the meal will be more important. Or something. At least he usually gets a few good quips in the rest of the show. He's great. I mostly want him to talk more because I love his voice. Yay, Ted.

Here are some links:

Here's an article about irony that covers the history of the term, the various kinds of irony, and footnote humor, because I always love that.

I probably should have heard of this a long time ago. But I didn't. That's probably your fault. (Everything at Ink Syndicate is good. Well, perhaps not everything. I haven't read it all yet.)

This article about whether animals feel emotions confused me. The implication seems to be that behaviorism taught us that animals' reactions are mechanical, not emotional. I thought that behaviorism taught us that animals's reactions, including their emotions, are mechanical, and the larger point was that human emotions are also mechanical. The whole "Say! Maybe animals' emotions are just as real as human emotions!" revelation suggests they missed that detail. On the other hand, I'm not sure why I'm surprised when it's a science article in Newsweek. Fine, forget I mentioned it.

Moving right along... I also ordered some stuff from Cheapass Games. I actually placed the order very late on Friday. And they arrived yesterday, which seems pretty amazing. Obviously, I haven't had a crowd of people over to playtest them, primarily because I don't know a crowd of playtesters, and that's why I'm so grumpy all the time. Well, one of the reasons. Where was I? Well, I did read over the rules and played a few turns of them to get the idea for how they worked. So here are the tentative reviews:

• Freeloader: sort of the sequel to Get Out. Or perhaps not. The board is set up to represent a neighborhood of six houses. Players circle the board placing tokens ("favors") in the houses which they will trade for goodies, represented by cards. You can also vie to be the best friend of the homeowners, because then it takes fewer favors to get stuff from them. There are four categories of goodies, and to win you have cards in all four categories and the highest total point value on your cards. The rules seemed a bit complicated, but as I said, I played a few turns to see how it worked, and it seems pretty neat. I also like that the board sections can go together in any order since that adds some more variety. I love Kill Doctor Lucky and all, but I like it when they make the fact that the board comes in sections an actual feature of gameplay. Anyway, it looks promising. Oh, although the cards aren't as inherently amusing as usual. On the other hand, the art is a lot nicer than usual. And it's in three colors! Oooooo. I suppose that's a fair trade.

Speaking of using the sectional boards to their advantage -- my family played The Great Brain Robbery again back when I had free time. Just so you understand the transition, in this game, the board cards are traincars. When you move forward into another car, you add a new section of board. And later on, the cars at the end of the train starts dropping off. Which can be exciting if you're in that car at the time. It was more satisfying this time, because we fought more. But my brother seems to have a knack for rolling high numbers. It's suspicious. He won largely because we couldn't even get close enough to him to fight. Although that made up for me kicking his ass at Exploration. Hah!

Exploration is not by Cheapass, incidentally. We've had it forever. I think it's older than I am. I don't mean the game itself, which definitely is -- I mean our copy. I don't remember it ever having a box, and we noticed that even the plastic bag we keep the pieces in is looking a bit fragile with age. Lots of the cards have been repaired with rubber cement. It's probably not such an amazing game that you'll want to keep it for forty years, mind you, but it's fun and it's a game I grew up playing, and hardly anyone else seems to have heard of. Like Mille Bornes, but more so. Okay, back to the new stuff.

• I got a couple of Cheapass' "Hip Pocket" games -- they're card games that come in a little ziplock bags, and thus are even more affordable and even more portable. Plus, both of the games I got work for two or more players. I figured that was a good purchase, since I have an awful lot of games that only work with three or more players, and see above regarding the dearth of roaming packs of people who will play games with me. It's all so sad. I got Cube Farm, in which you're laying out an office floorplan and score points based on whether you can reach goodies like the coffee machine and the water cooler, and The Very Clever Pipe Game, in which... well, guess. They're both nice little strategy games. I'm most intrigued by Cube Farm, mostly because it's played in short hands, and I could do with more fast-playing games as well.

• And I got The Works, which is based on the Girl Genius comic book series by Phil and Kaja Foglio. Which I have never heard of. Not that my not-hearing of them means anything; I just didn't buy it because it was a tie-in. Although I might check out the series now, because based on the cards, it looks pretty whimsical. They're also excitingly full-color. The cards. Well, I assume the series is, as well. This is another one where I had to set up a game and play a few turns to understand how it worked, but I think I got the idea. I don't know how to describe the idea, though. It's not really a card game in the usual sense; the cards are used as game pieces and you're trying to arrange them in certain ways. Sort of Othello-like because, as well as scoring points yourself, you have to think about arranging things so it's difficult for your opponent to score points. And maybe setting up your next turn. But you can have more than two players, which means anticipating what the board will look like by the time its your turn again could get tricky. I'll probably be bad at it, because I'm not so great at forming multiple contingency plans in that sort of game. On the other hand, sometimes I'm great at dumb luck. Anyway, I'm the most intrigued by this one. The basic structure is actually very simple, which is what you want in a strategy game, because that lets the players create all the complications. Just FYI, this one's a little more expensive than usual for Cheapass, but the cards are really gorgeous, and there's over a hundred of them, so that's why it's a bit pricier.

And I got some free games -- one on a business card, which probably makes it the most portable game ever. I shall promptly lose it, I'm sure. To be honest, the card just has the rules. You also need some spare change to play the game itself. All in all, I got a board game, three card games, and some free stuff for thirty-odd bucks. Good deal. You should probably go buy some stuff from Cheapass if you haven't, because you know how times are, and they had to lay people off, and I'm not as good at hyping things as Pamie is, but they do so many weird and clever things, and for ten bucks you can get a game or two. G'wan. You know you want to.

Hey speaking of Pamie, did you hear she wrote a book? Fine, spoil my news. But that's pretty neat, isn't it? What's even neater is that it's genuinely good, and funny, and dude -- I know someone who wrote a book! I mean, not really well, but when I met her, she hadn't written a book, and now she has. I can say that I knew her when! That's so wacky. And Why Girls Are Weird is good enough that after a few chapters even the corner of my brain that kept chanting, "Pamie, who I have met, wrote this book that I am holding!" finally got absorbed in what I was reading. I'm really self-involved, you know. So "good enough to distract the voices in my head from gibbering like monkeys" is a high endorsement. (And wouldn't that be a great blurb?) On the one hand, if you haven't gotten it by now you're clearly some kind of crazy person and shouldn't be allowed to read this site because my ramblings are bound to trigger one of your episodes, and the next thing you know, you'll be another quiet loner in the news, making the rest of us quiet loners look bad, which just encourages us to be even more quiet and, uh, loner-ish, but on the other hand (and yes, I am determined to finish this sentence eventually, whatever you might think), just on the off chance you haven't already bought a couple of dozen copies yet for everyone you know, you ought to check it out.

That was my Faulkner impression. Although my brother's is much better. I'm very tired, you know.

One more ramble and then I swear I'll stop. I've read the first Artemis Fowl book, and am nearly halfway through the second. Not that they're long, but I've had all these games distracting me. I'd gotten them for my mom (what?) because they sounded fun, and she lent them to me. She said the second book was better. I'm not that thrilled with them. I know they're kids' books, and I'm okay with the cursory characterization and the repetition because of that, but... well, okay, I guess I'm not really okay with those things but I'd deal if that was the only problem. But the cross-genre thing tires me even more. So, there's Artemis Fowl, who's a teenage master criminal and zillionaire. Okay, that's cool. And there are faries, who aren't jolly little sprites. They're mostly crabby military types. And they have magic and super-technology, and that's where things start to grate a bit. Because the magic is inexplicable, fine, but then there are paragraphs explaining exactly how they ride thermal flares with high-tech gadgets and the thing is, I don't care. Especially when it all rests on what's essentially magic anyway. So I skim past those pages (and seriously, there's pages of description just to say "Character A went to the surface.") and when I stop skimming, I'm reading about a couple of crabby characters snapping at each other, which makes me wonder why I stoppped skimming. They're not bad books, and I can see why a lot of kids would like them because there's the magic and the gadgets and the super-cool teenager. I expected to like them myself, so it's kind of a disappointment. Oh well. As I said, they're not bad, but I wouldn't seek them out particularly.

And that's today's installment. I still have some DVDs to talk about. If I ever find my remote.

Last Sunday was the first day in about two weeks I didn't go to work. And I'll probably be working the next couple of weekends, too. So it was sort of my last hurrah for goofing off. "Hurrah," I said, as I spent money on, well, rather dull things to be honest. But I like my new silverware.

I also got fun things, though. Like, can you guess? Comics! Hurrah, again!

• Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Vol. #5. They finally got some more in. "Finally" is probably overdoing it, since it's only been a couple of weeks and it's not like I was checking the store every day. I'm not that big a geek. Er, not quite. Actually, the fun thing about the long gap between issues is that I'd forgotten a lot of what was going on. I mean, Martians, that I can remember. But I'd forgotten what Mina and Quartermain were off doing (ahem, not like that -- I remembered that) and so I was pretty startled when the talking bear turned up. And then, well, there was the shocking thing. Which I'm going to skim over because while I normally don't worry about spoilers, this particular event did actually startle me in a "Oh my god I can't believe Moore's doing that" way, and that effect seems worth preserving. I think it's safe to assume the won't be adapting that into a movie. Not that they worried much about adapting the first one, apparently, but I you know what I mean. And hey, the bit after that, with the blood? That was neat. I hope it's not months and months till the final issue.

  Incidentally, no, I haven't seen the movie yet. I want to, because it sure sounds awful. I also want to see Pirates of the Caribbean. It's possible I can see one or the other next weekend, and I'm really torn about whether I want to see the movie that should be really fun but isn't, or the movie that shouldn't be but, by all accounts, is. It may depend on which has the earlier matinee. Or on whether League is even still playing by next weekend.

• Switchblade Honey, by Warren Ellis. It's a western in space! Sorry, no, it isn't, actually. I just like running that joke into the ground. If Whedon did, why can't I? Er, let's start over. It is in space. It's actually an extended joke about how noble and healthy and desperately dull everyone in Star Trek is. Ellis' introduction explains that he was making fun of one of the Trek incarnations one night and thought, "They should get Ray Winstone as captain." Winstone played Will Scarlet in that Robin Hood show I went on about a while ago, and he's done a lot of other stuff, and he's... terrier like. You know? Very outgoing and likable but there's a sense that if you push him the wrong way, he will absolutely tear you to bits. Sort of Tim Roth-ish, if that helps. Anyway, so the story is about how Earth is doomed, etc., and Our Only Hope is a Rag-tag team of misfits. Except they're really misfits; they're released from military prison because Earth has to resort to guerilla warfare. The story's okay, but it's mostly fun as an anti-Trek story. Much cursing and drinking and smoking on the bridge. I'm not selling it very well, and Ellis freely admits it's just a gag, but it amused me, and that's good enough. It would actually make a good series pilot, though. Actually, it occurs to me I should get a copy for Keckler so she can imagine the alternate version while suffering through Enterprise.

• Last of the Independents, by Matt Fraction and Kieron Dwyer, is a good, solid, unwholesome action movie. The acknowledgments give props to Sam Peckinpah, John Ford, Clint Eastwood, Lee Marvin, etc. It's got bank robbing and cowboys and gratuitous sex and an airplane and a ferris wheel and gratuitous violence and mobsters and landmines and gratuitous Rockford Files nods. And a neat sepia-tone instead of black & white, which took me a few pages to adjust to, but then I really liked it. And a lot of great lines: "Somebody put a bunch of money in our safe!" and "You sure you don't want to go back and get some more guys?" and "Billy thinks about puppies." You kind of have to see the visuals on that last one to appreciate it.

• Brian Bendis' Fortune and Glory is a little autobiographical tale of Bendis' adventures in Hollywood a few years back, and is equally amusing even though there's no sex and violence. He describes the weirdness of having people calling to option his books when all they knew was he'd been featured in Spin, and the way everyone looked up to see if he was Someone Important when he walked into restaurants, only to look away a second later, and pitches and meetings and agents, and the thrill of seeing Clint Eastwood coming out of a bathroom (hey, he seems to believe it was thrilling) and it's educational as well as entertaining. Well, educational about the entertainment industry, but that counts, right?

• And last, and also least... Jill Thompson's Death: At Death's Door. I don't know what the point of this was, and I really regret paying for it. It's a little Manga softcover version of Season of Mists. I mean, it's a shot for shot remake. Or a reimagining. Or whatever. Except there's more sidestory about what Death and Delirium and Despair were up to when Hell was emptied. But apart from that it's just Season of Mists. Panel for panel. I don't know why. I guess maybe Thompson wanted to do a story about what happened when all the ghosts were sent out of Hell in that story, and then it wouldn't make any sense unless you knew why it happened, and how Hell was opened under new management, and okay, but I'm not sure how much sense it makes as is, since it's abbreviated and you only see the start and end, and ... eh. I still don't see the point. Maybe they think people who wouldn't have ever read Sandman will start because this has perky Manga-Death on the cover. There is an extended "Buy everything else related to Sandman spiel at the end, so I suppose that is the theory, and they're probably not wrong. But I'll do my part by not buying any more of these. Yeah, it's got a #1 on it, so I assume there'll be more. Although maybe they're just using that story to jumpstart stories that will be more than 25% original content? Hm. No, I don't think I care even then. Blech.

Now I must sleep. But there's more to talk about, with the DVDs and -- just today -- games! All kinds of fun stuff. Nevertheless, it's bedtime. To be continued...

So I read this heavily autobiographical book about a girl who grows up in a horribly abusive home. Although she's really smart, she doesn't get along with her peers, so school doesn't work out that well. She grows up, moves out, hooks up with an equally troubled boy, and they have one of those obsessive, passionate, violent relationships you hear about on talk shows. Things start to go bad, but she's starting to be recognized for her rather controversial writing. She gets a book deal. Her now-husband gets cancer. She has an affair with an even more screwed-up guy. The badness spirals in on them all. She tries to break up with the boyfriend repeatedly, and there's screaming and fighting and he threatens to kill her, and she keeps going back to him. She even takes out a restraining order against the guy at one point, but she can't break away from him emotionally. When she finally tries to get the guy to leave for good, he won't. She injures him. And goes to jail for two years. While she's in prison, she wrote this book.

It'd be an Oprah title except that I lied about one thing: the sexes are reversed. It's Shit Magnet, by Jim Goad, and I got it as part of my recent Fantagraphics haul. I'd been meaning to get it for a while. I really liked The Redneck Manifesto, which is not a bit of trailer-park whimsy, even if it sounds like it. Manifesto is definitely worth reading, especially if you like to make other people uncomfortable by pointing out politically inconvenient facts. It's a good, challenging book. Books that make me think about things differently are always good. Books that make me uncomfortable, especially so, because that means I've found a blind spot I didn't know about.

Shit Magnet is even more uncomfortable. Like having a tub of ice water dumped on you.

When mom would hug me, she'd pat me on the back as if she was uncomfortable and couldn't wait for it to be over. There was a stilted insincerity to her hugs.

But she hit me like she meant it.

The early chapters are pretty hard to read (and I read crime fiction about child abuse) and probably even harder to talk about. I don't want to go on making it sound like an Oprah book, or some kind of Dave Eggers self-justification story; Goad is more honest about things. I guess it's free of self-pity, and that makes the difference. And he's way too aggressive about his own anger (which isn't unjustified) to sound defensive.

Goad pushes buttons. He likes to, because the way people react reveals so much hypocrisy and insane thinking. If reading the first two paragraphs here made you automatically say, "Ugh, a book by someone who hit a woman! There's no excuse for that!" that's one of his points. Because the reason I wrote the opening that way is that I think Goad's right to believe that if the sexes had been reversed, he wouldn't have gone to jail.

It's not just about that, though. And it's not just about how we view the sexes. Child abuse, obviously, comes up. Psychology. The chapters about life in prison illustrate just how bonkers that system is; I'm tempted to recommend the book to Dr. Zant, who taught a class in Juvenile Criminology (or something like that).

Sidenote: that was a great class. I took it because it sounded sort of interesting, and what the hell? And so I end up in a class that was mostly full of people planning to become either lawyers or cops. They think they're going to learn about Why People Go Bad And How We Stop Them. Instead, nearly all of the semester is spent on a rather philosophical exploration of why societies actually need deviant behavior, various crackpot theories about what causes deviance (and how they still influence the justice system) and why punishment doesn't prevent crime. I think it freaked people out a bit, because he was very deliberate about questioning every assumption people had about behavior. Seriously, we spent at least the first month talking about how religions are developed to explain the world. Dr Zant was cool.

So, yeah. Jim Goad. I'm not making the book sound funny enough, either. It's obviously a pretty fucking dark humor. I'm going to close with this, because it does sum up the book pretty well, and plus I like it on general principles:

Never in my life have I dictated how anyone else should feel or think. I couldn't give an unlubed fuck if someone's opinions differ from mine. I have no interest in controlling the cavernous expanse between someone else's ears. I only have a desire not to be controlled. Silly me, expecting the same in return.

My attitude is that if I can handle it, then it's everyone else's obligation to aspire to my level of sophistication. I'm sick of having to dumb-down everything. Let the slaggards catch up to me for a change.

More catching up. I can go for months without actually doing anything, and still have stuff to talk about! And the way work is going, I may do just that.

Joe Bob Briggs' Profoundly Disturbing is chock full of trivia and neat anecdotes and funny stories. And it's also about some neat movies. Funny, that. It's about movies that have been "banned, censored, condemned, or despised because in one way or another they expanded what the camera sees into some area that was previously verboten." The sections on each movie vary in subject a bit. Some are more about the techniques in the movie and why it was ground-breaking at the time (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, for instance). The chapter about Drunken Master discusses Jackie Chan's career and Hong Kong films in general. The chapter on Blood Feast is mostly about the making of the movie, with some very funny comments by Herschell Gordon Lewis. (My favorite is, "Blood Feast is like a Walt Whitman poem. It's no good, but it's the first of its type, and therefore it deserves a certain position." Heh.) And the one on Crash focuses on analyzing the story itself. So it's not purely film criticism, and not just behind-the-scenes stories, but a mix of (I'm guessing) whatever seemed most interesting to talk about for each particular movie.

After each chapter there's a few pages which talk about other movies that were inspired by, or ripped-off from, or along the same lines as, the movie in question. Kind of a "if you liked this, try..." section, which is cool.

And, because this is what you're curious about, the movies are: The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari; Mom and Dad; Creature from the Black Lagoon; And God Created Woman; The Curse of Frankenstein; Blood Feast; The Wild Bunch; Shaft; Deep Throat; The Exorcist; Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS; The Texas Chain Saw Massacre; Drunken Master; Reservoir Dogs; and Crash. Mom and Dad is the one you're least likely to have heard of, I'm guessing. It was supposedly a sex-education movie back in the 1940's, but it was more like a circus sideshow.

In other movie-related news, Heroes & Monsters: The Unofficial Companion to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is just what the title says. (Oh, the book is actually about volume 1 of the comics, not the movie. I was just doing a little segue there.) The book is a collection of the amazing annotations compiled by Jess Nevins. So yes, most of the text is available online already. The artist, Kevin O'Niell, also adds his comments on some of the annotations -- sometimes he clarifies or confirms an item, and on a few occasions he says the annotation is wrong and he wasn't trying to reference anything there (these last are, obviously, pretty funny). But the book also feature a very funny introduction by Alan Moore, an 30-page interview with Moore by Nevins, and fifty-odd pages of essays by Nevins about elements in the story. The additional material is pretty nice, and I threw the page-counts in there so you understand it's not just five pages of "bonus material" thrown in to lure you into buying something you've already read. Although I think it's worth buying just for the annotations, because I like supporting people who create things I find useful, and those annotations are plenty useful.