"Puppet wrangler? There weren't any puppets in this movie!" – Crow T. Robot
Maybe I should be glad the wireless internet in the house is down. There’s a group in Sante Fe that claims to be allergic. They’re suing the city to have Wi-Fi banned from all public buildings.
Wouldn’t it be horrible if in twenty or thirty years it turned out they were right?
Via Gerry Canavan.
The AV Club’s Commentary Tracks of the Damned running feature includes the category “inevitable dash of pretension.” Which is what I immediately thought of when I read this:
The creators of NBC’s horror anthology series Fear Itself told reporters that they think president Franklin D. Roosevelt would have liked the title, drawn from his first inaugural address.
Mick Garris, the filmmaker who created the show, came up with it, producers said. (Speaking about the world’s various threats, Roosevelt famously said: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”)
“It was Mick Garris’ idea,” producer Keith Addis said in a conference call with reporters. “There was a lot of enthusiasm about the idea as soon as he mentioned it in one of the first meetings.”
Addis said of the late president, “One hopes he’d have a rich and wonderful sense of humor about it.”
It’s not as if it’s an obscure quote or anything, and it’s not like it hasn’t been used plenty of times before. I haven’t seen or heard much about the series, but I hope the rest of it is more original and less pretentious.
Oh Steven Moffatt, you strange and wonderful man, you…
Gee, Lucy Ellmann, tell us how you really feel.
Chuck Palahniuk’s new novel Snuff might be as awful as she says. I’m not terrifically interested in it. I’ve only ever read his Lullaby, which I found interesting but overly fond of the info-dump as a stylistic device. (Tasha Robinson wrote in her review that Palahniuk had “started to write in paragraphs instead of catchphrases,” which makes me very nervous about tackling any of his earlier books.)
But it’s the wholesale dismissal of American culture and heavy-handed approach that bugs me most about Ellmann’s review. She starts with:
So not only has America tried to ruin the rest of the world with its wars, its financial meltdown and its stupid stupid food, it has allowed its own literary culture to implode. Jazz and patchwork quilts are still doing O.K., but books have descended into kitsch. I blame capitalism, Puritanism, philistinism, television and the computer.
Oh, and you kids? Get off her lawn!
She’s much more interested, it seems, in the subject matter of the novel — and what it supposedly has to say about the depravity and lack of depth of American popular culture — than in what the book itself has to say, and how well or poorly it says it. As I said, I’m not here to defend Palahniuk from criticism; I’m just wishing that’s what Ellmann’s article was.
Oh, and seriously, those puns — “running gag/gag and run” and “Palahniuk chucks” — reek of too clever by half, if you ask me.
Our internet connection was down for most of yesterday, for reasons that have not yet become apparent. The connection sprung back to life just as I was on the phone with the cable company to inquire/complain. It worked for a few minutes yesterday afternoon, however, so I’m not sure how long this will last. And I still can’t get online using my notebook, so there might still be something wrong with the router or the signal. (I’m having no trouble connecting to the house’s network; I just can’t do anything with it.)
This, of course, comes after a week where they started curtailing our internet usage at work, blocking some sites (including my personal e-mail). So if I’m absent, not posting, not responding to messages — that’s why.
Update: The connection appears to be still intermittent unless the wireless router is taken completely out of the equation. I get a signal when I try to connect through my notebook, and for all intents and purposes do connect to the house network. But all I get when I try to go online are DNS errors. And then those start happening on the main computer, too. So, at a guess, the router has failed, and the connection between it and the modem is making everything else go screwy.