I’ve been meaning to write a post on the finale of LOST for some time now. There seem to be two schools of thought on the totality of the show:

1) They didn’t answer many of the questions and so this show as nothing more than a giant con job.

2) They didn’t answer many of the questions but that’s okay because {fill in rationale here}.

Part of me is dumbfounded and makes me wonder if I watched the same final season as everyone else did. I have gone on record as saying that I didn’t expect them to answer all of the questions and figuring that a lot of people would be disappointed. But I was more wrong about what they did answer than I was about what they didn’t. My main questions going into the last season were:

1) What is the island and why is it special?

2) What is the smoke monster?

3) What happens to the people on the island?

4) Who is Jacob and why is he what he is?

5) What was the Dharma Initiative’s interest on the island?

Of those five questions, they answered four. I have some minor questions about the former inhabitants, how they got on the island, and in some cases how and wy they left (Charles Widmore in particular). Their record was spottier on those, but I consider those to be much smaller questions. And by and large, they were questions that I could answer any number of ways. I much prefer those kind of unanswered questions to those that are extremely difficult. When I look over that video with all of the unanswered questions of Lost, with only a couple of exceptions every question falls into one of three categories: (1) They answered that question to my satisfaction, (2) the question seems answerable any number of ways, or (3) it’s not really important. there were only two or maybe three questions that could be considered anything remotely a show-stopped (one definite, two maybes).

And unlike so many other commenters, I really think that they did have a pretty strong idea of where they were going from the outset. Matthew Baldwin suggests that they had to change course with the Jacob-Esau battle because every other possibility had been speculated upon, but when that type of thing typically happens it raises more questions than it answers and I felt like the late introduction of these characters (both of which having been alluded to or ethereally appearing earlier on) explained far more than they unsettled earlier revelations.

So in the end, I really felt like I got my money’s worth. If I don’t find myself employed soon, I may take a couple weeks and watch it from beginning to end. We’ll see if I still feel that way.

This set of ads combines two topics of Hit Coffee interest. First, the tendency to make women in commercials outwit the doofus men at every corner. Second, women punishing men (or even moreso, expecting men to punish himself, though I can’t find that one) for oogling women is okay while a man trying to punish a woman is something to be thwarted.

Part one:

Part two:

As those of you who care already know, Steve Carrell is leaving The Office. So… what now?

The most apt comparison is to Phil Hartmann’s death and replacement on NewsRadio. Not just because they’re replacing (assuming they replace him, which they probably will, since NBC needs anything they can call a hit) an anchor of the show, but because Hartmann’s and Carrell’s roles were in some ways pretty similar. They were comedy relief while the real plot focused on the sexual tension between two other characters (Dave and Lisa on NewsRadio and Jim and Pam on The Office). That was the case early on moreso than it is now, though. The Michael Scott (Carrell) character has turned out to be far more three-dimensional than Bill McNeal (Hartmann) ever was. And the Jim-Pam plot has more-or-less revolved itself.

Even so, I hope that they avoid the mistake that NewsRadio made and keep Jon Lovitz as far away from this show as humanly possible! I’m no fan of Lovitz to begin with, but he was 100% wrong to replace Hartmann. He wouldn’t be quite as wrong to replace Carrell, but his over-the-top manner would not fit in well. I’m not worried about Lovitz specifically since I doubt they would bring him on, but I do hope that they don’t go the same shallow route. Leslie Knope from Parks & Recreation is about the right combination of similar-but-different that they should be going for.

That’s assuming that they replace Carrell’s character with a new head-of-branch. One thing they could do is simply promote from within. After too long a wait, they finally added Edd Helms to the starting credits (he should have replaced Novak two seasons back) and so losing Carrell would simply put them back at the previous number. One commenter in the linked article at the top of this post suggested Gabe (the empty suit from Florida). That could actually be a great idea as a true foil for the rest of the cast. The character doesn’t have the depth now, but they could add to it.

One of the unfortunate things is that they’ve already played out the plots that it would be really useful to have about now. They’ve already had Jim be the boss (or co-boss) and having him replace Michael would have had some possibility. And since they’ve already more-or-less resolved the Jim-Pam romance, they can’t lean on that, either. I’m not sure who else from the office (besides Gabe) would be a suitable replacement. Dwight from earlier in the show might have been, but it wouldn’t seem quite right at this juncture. They’ve also run with the Ryan-as-a-foil plot. So… I don’t know.

They do need to figure out something if they’re going to continue the show. The ensemble cast is particular strong, but I don’t know if it’s that strong without a Michael-like anchor or a really good romantic subplot.

I say go with Gabe.

In honor of my knocking around Colosse and Delosa for the past week or so…

Paul at Gone Hollywood has brings attention to a list of ten careers that are in need of a comeback. As far as I am concerned, if I never Cuba Gooding in another movie, I will be happier for it. I can’t exactly lament the passing of the career of Jean Claude Van Damme, either. Like Schwarzenegger, there are only so many roles for someone that has to speak through an accent. I agree it’s a shame about Wesley Snipes, but the dude is going to jail and I’m not itching enough to see him to really care all that much.

The big “Totally!” was with the last one, Michael Keaton. I happened to see him in an in-flight movie and was thinking that I hadn’t seen him in a while. Same goes for Bill Pullman, who used to be in something like two or three movies a year and who I also saw recently in-flight. I’d like to see both more often. Particularly Keaton.

I’m sure that there are others I would like to see again, but since I haven’t seen them lately I doubt I can remember who they are.

Any formerly big actors that y’all miss?

Christian Bale has taken some flack for the voice he uses as Batman in the most recent Batman movies. Kevin Conroy, who did the voice in The Animated Series, had some pretty critical things to say about it:
He said: “[Bale is] an excellent actor. He just got steered wrong. Obviously someone should have stopped him and said ‘You sound ridiculous.’ But no one did. As actors, you have to trust the people on the other side of the camera, because you can’t see what’s going on. You’re working in such a vacuum that you can convince yourself that anything is great. So you need a third eye to tell you that you’re way off base. Unfortunately no one stopped him.”
Conroy’s voice in The Animated Series stands out in what is already an amazing cast. His ability to make Bruce Wayne and Batman sound like distinct but credible people is phenomenal. It is compared to that Bale sounds so awful.

That being said, Bale’s voice doesn’t annoy me nearly as much as it annoys others. The difference between Conroy’s Batman voice and Bale’s Batman voice is the difference between a mask that is supposed to look like a face and a mask that does not bother. Bale’s voice sounds pretty much like somebody trying to mask his voice, which in effect is what Bale is doing. On a screen, it sounds goofy, though as a criminal being approached by the mythic Dark Knight, you’re probably too scared to really notice. The most important part, that his voice sounds distinct from Bruce Wayne’s, is accomplished.

Video Below: (more…)

Though I’ve never seen Adams play, more than once I’ve heard this song covered as the last song of the last encore, when the frontman is still on the stage and the band has left. It’s an amazing experience.

While checking out of Safeway the other day, I noticed that they were selling a paperback of one of the Twilight novels. I have neither read any of the books or seen any of the movies, so that’s not what this post is about. Rather, this post is about the fact that this particular version of the paperback had Kristen Stewart’s photo on it with the familiar “Now a Feature Movie” or somesuch along the bottom.

While I have not seen the movies or read the books for the Twilight series, I have read (or more accurately heard) the book and seen the movies of the Jason Bourne series. It’s really pretty difficult to get a copy of the paperback of any of the books that have become movies without a picture of Matt Damon on the cover. The problem is that the books and the movies have almost nothing in common. It’s not simply replacing one cover for the book with another cover for the book that happens to include an actor from a movie based on the book. It’s replacing the cover of the book with another cover that includes an actor based on an entirely different movie with the only things in common being a few character names and a plot involving amnesia.

This is particularly true for the second book. The movie takes place in Germany, the book in Asia.

I know full well why they do it. I still find it irritating. Even though I assume that the Twilight movies have more in common with the book than the Bourne movies, and though Kristen Stewart is incredibly pleasant to look at, that one bothers me because the original covers to the book are particularly visually interesting and compelling. I can’t tell you how many times a book’s cover jumped out at me only for me to look at it and see “Oh, it’s a Twilight book” and start looking elsewhere.

Though I do understand why they do it, I wish that they would at least keep the original covers available for those of us that don’t want to mix media. It’s almost enough to make me want to go ahead and buy the fourth and fifth book while the covers are still Damon-Free.

Sorry, I just have to get this off my chest.

A Facebook friend was singing the virtues of the iPhone 4’s new OS. Including…

Multitasking, screen rotation lock, 3-D Style dock bar, background (Home Screen) backgrounds, Folders for multiple apps, Option to turn off vibration when in ringing mode, multiple email accounts under one inbox.

With the exception of the 3D-Style dockbar, Windows Mobile has been able to do each of these things since Windows Mobile 2003 (okay, that last one may have only come around for WM6, released in 2007). I wish I could go back in time six months or a year so that I can brag about WinMo on that basis so that I could get some Applytes on record as saying that none of those things matter.

Maria has a really good post on the subject:

The soccer scolds don’t understand that American football is something that grew up organically, out of a specific culture, at a specific time and place. That doesn’t make it either superior or inferior to soccer, it just makes it our game. Those hundred-year-old chants and ancient rivalries serve the same purpose as all other cultural traditions: they build valuable social capital.

I think the importance of this is hard to underestimate. In some ways, football is successful simply because it is successful and thus has significant social capital built behind it. By most standards, indoor football is a tweaked version of regular football that is in many ways more entertaining. But it’s not football. It doesn’t have the hundred years of tradition. It’s hard for any sport, even a superior one (which I don’t believe soccer to be) to break in.

On a sidenote, one of the things that is the death knell of soccer in this country is Title IX. Kind of ironic since many of the most ardent supporters of soccer are also ardent supporters of Title IX. But Title IX lead to a contraction of male sports in college and men’s soccer was decimated (the SEC has only a couple schools that support it!). If soccer were to become a major sport, the most likely way it would do so is through coverage of college sports. With the conferences setting up their own networks, minor sports like volleyball and women’s soccer are likely to start getting some actual airtime. But men’s soccer is almost nowhere to be found. I doubt women’s soccer will take off for a variety of reasons but mostly because women’s basketball has been given so many chances to succeed and never has. This isn’t a knock against Title IX, which I largely support, but just an observation.

Her story about learning the rules of football is fascinating. I had no interest in football (despite, or because of, my obsession with baseball) until around the sixth grade. I learned about the game through Madden Football for the Apple ][e. A very, very different game than its counterparts. The thing that was hardest for me to wrap my head around was the fact that a season only consisted of 16 games. Baseball had 162. What kind of season was only 16 games?! The teams only play each other twice?! Though since being introduced to college football, I discovered that was actually one time too many.

In addition to what I learned from computer games, my friend Clint and I would start playing imaginary games outside. We would rotate quarterback and receiver, though we always did better when I threw and he caught. I had played imaginary football with my friend Frank before, so I knew the basics about four downs and all that pretty early on. But there’s a world of difference between pass-catch and contemplating 22 players on the field with different rules as to what they could and could not do, learning different plays, and so on.

Anyway, what I discovered from a video game perspective was that football was way more fun. Not just in terms of playing the little red and blue sprites on the field of green pixels, but there was also a cerebral world to it that was mostly lacking in baseball. The great thing about baseball was the statistics. I’m a statistics guy (hence my recent endeavor to create a statistical model for comparing the NCAA football conferences against one another). But football was strategic. Play-counterplay. What is the defense thinking? What is the offense thinking? So much time thinking for slices of action. It was the perfect sport for me.

The biggest knock against football is the fact that there is so little actual gametime and so much time in between. It’s a matter of taste. You can reduce a football game to under 15 minutes if you tried, but have you ever tried? It takes a lot away from the game. To me, the difference between football and basketball is the difference between a suspense thriller and an Jean-Claude Van Damme flick. I almost always prefer suspense. Half of football is about “What happens next?” That’s part of the enjoyment. Some people don’t get that enjoyment. Such is life.

I try to catch Southern Tech Packers athletics every time I go back to Colosse. I catch an average of a couple of football games and a couple basketball games and a single baseball game a year. They all have their plusses and minuses, but I mostly watch the others due to the connection with my alma mater while football I will watch whether I have a stake in the game or not.

Here’s a promo for the new video game. Looks pretty sweet, though since they did what they did to Kano, it’s hard for me to get into the game anymore. Plus, no video applicable video game system.

Here’s a pitch for a new TV series. How much better would this have been than the movies we got? So much better.

A goofy video on the exploits within the game.

Mortal Kombat vs. Oregon Trail. What more can I say?

As the World Cup gears up, Jonathan Last points to a column he wrote a eight years ago with a title and subtitle that says it all: The Ritual Attack of the Soccer Scolds - Every four years a cadre of self-righteous soccer fans appears to chastise and convert the non-believers.

This time he makes a point he kind of neglected to really get into in his original piece: it’s not like soccer hasn’t been given a chance in this country. To harken back to a quote from the original article:

“That’s something none of our professional leagues can attest to. . . . Most people that don’t like soccer have never played the sport, aren’t coordinated enough to play the sport, and don’t have the athleticism to play it.”

Are you kidding me? When you grow up, there are three main little league sports and soccer is one of them. It’s kind of a placeholder for football because the young bodies aren’t ready for it yet. The term soccer mom does not exist because people don’t play soccer! You can say “Oh, well they play it at kids but they forget or they are too unhealthy to play it now.” Except that most people don’t play any sports after they grow up. And the biggest sport, football, is one that far more people go their entire lives without playing. And yet football thrives while soccer doesn’t.

NPR recently argued racism as a cause, but the claim is really pretty weak. None of the major sports in the US is dominated by white people unless you count hockey, the least popular of the big four (or perhaps more accurately, the half of the big three-and-a-half). Some have argued that NASCAR ascendancy is due to the fact that it is dominated by white people, but at this point I think NASCAR is more of a cultural curiosity than a big time sport. The “American arrogance” argument is a little stronger in that Americans tend to like things that prove our superiority, but it doesn’t stop us from embracing soccer for youngsters.

None of this is to say that soccer isn’t a worthwhile sport. One of the reasons it is so popular across the world is that it is the sport that anyone can play. You just need two approximate goals and a ball. And I confess some sympathy for soccer-philes who love the fact that it’s something that kids all across the world play. That’s really kind of neat.

But that doesn’t make it entertaining to watch. And it’s not like the sports industry hasn’t tried. They’ve tried and tried. League after league. No sport besides women’s basketball has been given more and better chances. And it hasn’t taken. Efforts to turn it into something that people will watch, as indoor soccer does, often just alienates the faithful.

All of it is a matter of taste, of course. I get what Otherwill is saying at TLoOG
. I think the big draw of football for me is the strategy and counterstrategy and the main reason I’ve kind of soured on baseball and football is that there is so much less of it involved. In baseball you have lineups, substitutions, and the occasional intentional walk. Basketball has a little more, though with so many scores you don’t get games that are made and broken by a handful of plays. If there is one thing I do appreciate about soccer, it’s the low scores. That almost takes it to an extreme, though.

Soccer’s ho-hum aside, I do find the notion of World Cups extremely neat. Back when I was living in Deseret all of the former missionaries seemed to be rooting for the country they did their mission in. I’d imagine if I was working at Mindstorm now, with its excess of folks on H1-B visas, you’d get something similar. It actually brings me to something I appreciate about college football: no matter where in the country you’re from, chances are you’ve got a stake. No matter where in the world you are, you’ve got a stake.

One doesn’t get to say this often, but the USC Trojans are getting absolutely demolished. Due to various infractions, they are set to lose 30 scholarships over three seasons, a two year bowl suspension, and 14 vacated wins.

Nobody will ever accuse me of being a Trojan fan, but that last one bugs me a little. And it actually has little to do with the Trojans in particular. I felt the same way when Memphis was forced to vacate 38 of its basketball wins and Florida State 12 of their football wins. It’s not that I think these punishments are harsh. It’s mostly that they’re stupid.

These wins are vacated on the idea that kids were playing that shouldn’t. And when that happens, teams forfeit. This is retroactively that. The problem is that losses don’t occur two years after the games were played. They are lost on the spot. Minute by aching minute. And the victories are won on the spot. You can’t take away the euphoria of winning. You just can’t.

For some reason I’m more on the fence when it comes to championships. Unlike regular wins, championship cups are something that a university points to two years later that still has some significance. Taking that away does actually mean something. Once upon a time, they were going to win three championships in a row. They even alter-coined “threepeat” into “three-Pete” in honor of their coach, Pete Carroll. The problem with this then was that their first championship was contested and, well, they lost that third one. If they lose 2004, they will have, despite fielding an amazing team, not have any BCS championship trophies sitting on their shelf. That is significant. Reversing the outcome of their 49-0 victory over the Colorado State Rams? Not so much. It’s not worth the asterisk.

When I was a kid, the Muscogea State Wildcats got into some similar trouble and were forced to forfeit two games the following season. The problem? Nobody recognized the losses. When the networks were covering the game, they would put an asterisk by their actual record. Went kinda like MSU Wildcats, 5-1* (* - official record 3-3 due to two forfeits). It didn’t affect their rankings. Didn’t really mattered. Everyone knew who won. And those victories were earned.

So what do I propose as an alternative? Go after future wins. Not in the lame way they got MSU. I mean make it darn hard for them to win. The scholarships are a start. The lack of bowl games are too, because they make recruiting more difficult. I say take more scholarships. And more importantly, let any kid going there transfer out. Any kid at all. As it stands, they’re letting upper-classmen do so but saddling the poor kids that just signed on with USC with a mediocre team. Some of them may deserve it because they accepted things they shouldn’t, but that shouldn’t be the assumption. Let all the kids go. That will hurt USC far more than taking away 14 wins ever would.

It’s also more proportional and appropriate. The Trojans weren’t paying off refs. They won the games they played. But they won them (at least in part - probably little part) on recruiting shenanigans. So go after recruiting. Make it impossible to recruit. The most effective sanctions ever were done to SMU, who was deprived of playing football for two years. Their program never recovered. So effective was this punishment that the league more-or-less decided never to do it again. But hit them where it hurts.

A couple of sidenotes.

First, one of the frustrating aspects about all of these suspensions is that they so often don’t get the people responsible. There isn’t much they can do to Pete Carroll because he’s a coach now in a league where paying players is okay, but Memphis Coach John Calipari became Kentucky Coach John Calipari and left the mess he made behind. All you can do in coaches is strip them of their wins, which unlike with programs actually is effective because winning percentages are their bread and butter.

Second, it’s hard not to notice that these things always come to light after a program has fallen from its peak. I suppose it makes sense to a degree because a season like the Trojans’ in 2004 attracts attention and it takes a while for everything to fall into place. But sometimes I think it’s a little like the NCAA banning bible verses on eye-black only after Tim Tebow graduated. It makes me wonder if they hold on to this stuff while the teams are attracting attention for the league and then, only once their ride is over, they get slammed with it.

The other day I wrote:

For a writer, I really don’t know the answers to any of these questions and more like I probably should. I am in the camp of fictionalizing as much as possible. This is not news to Hit Coffee readers, but it’s also true in my fiction. The President, if portrayed, is never the actual president unless he absolutely has to be. Microsoft doesn’t exist. The movie stars will never be Tom Hanks and the dirty celebrities Paris Hilton unless it’s such a passing reference that I need the instant recognition.

I was thinking about this prior to having written that post or hearing about the whole Wiesel play thing. It most recently came to mind when I was watching Iron Man 2. In the movie, they show clips of Bill O’Reilly commentating and Christianne Amanpour reporting the news. I found that irritating and not just because I find Bill O’Reilly and Christianne Amanpour (and most “news” personalities and TV reporters, for that matter) irritating. I found it irritating because it blurred the lines between fact and fiction poorly. I was similarly irritated by the mock-Laughlin Group’s appearance in Watchmen.

Using real personalities or impersonators of real personalities can be an effective tool to add realism to stories. I didn’t object, for instance, when the Laughlin Group was used in either Dave or Independence Day. Both were, at least up until the aliens attacked in the latter movie, supposed to take place in something resembling the real world. So using real commentators (and in Dave, real senators) makes sense. But no one is pretending that Iron Man is realistic. No one is pretending that The Watchmen takes place in something resembling the real world. In the case of Iron Man, it’s not just that you have a guy in a power-suit and all that jazz. You can always push one anomaly, no matter how major, and say “and this is happening is a world exactly like our own!” But the Iron Man series continues to set up an Avengers movie. So you don’t just have a man in a suit, you have a dude with a magical hammer. You have a guy who took super-soldier serum during World War II, was frozen in ice, and thawed in modern day. You have a guy that through radiation becomes muscular and unintelligible. You have, in short, a world unlike our own.

And there’s nothing wrong with that! I say, embrace it! Have fun with it! Iron Man succeeds in large part because it sets out to be such a fun movie. Superhero movies trying to be realistic lays the groundwork for disappointment. X-Men, for instance, failed to embrace its superheroism and suffered for it. Watchmen, on the other hand, does try to take a distinctly unfun superhero path. But even there, the Laughlin Group doesn’t work because they explicitly chart out a different course for the history of events. Having John Laughlin around is one thing. Having him doing the exact same thing he’s doing in this world strikes me as internally inconsistent. The entire media landscape would change with Richard Nixon in his fifth term (nevermind the omnipotent blue guy).

But this isn’t about superhero movies. It’s about a lot of things. I think that at the outset of any story project that even tangentially involves politics or government, the creators need to decide how comparable their world is to our own world. A contemporary sitcom or drama, for instance, should take place in our world. Even if they throw in a fictional congressperson as a character. A show like Brothers & Sisters, which expressly involves politics, needs to make a decision one way or the other. Instead, they had a plot where Rob Lowe was a Republican character running for president against a more conservative Republican character running for president and these were the only two Republicans the plot explored… and Barack Obama was elected president. I can understand the dilemma because they want a show that is politically relevant and they also want a plot with Rob Lowe running for president, but I think they needed to make a decision one way or the other. Even if “The President” was an obvious stand-in for George W. Bush (and later Barack Obama). At the very least, it would have provided the opportunity for the president to become a character himself. The main reason that they didn’t - contemporary relevance - they threw out the window when they (a) put a Republican senator in California and more (b) made him a relevant figure in national politics (24 did the same thing, though Logan wasn’t a senator, and that sits wrong with me, too, though they did much else right as far as the internal politics goes).

In my own writing I have run into this question. My first, third, and fourth novel all take place in the same universe. I had an idea for a different branch of novels that involved a fictional president. However, when I canned that idea I found that using the Bush-Gore race as a metaphor was a super idea and I shifted it back to the real world. Then, when the fourth novel came around and I had a fictional congressperson, I had to think about it all over again (I ultimately decided that one fictional congressperson who would never go on to be president would not disrupt politics too much. And too much of the story was real-world for me to bother with fictional governance.

It’s not just politics, though. I see the same things when it comes to businesses. It’s one thing to throw a fictional company into the mix, but if that company is a powerhouse you have to account for existing powerhouses. The movie Anti-Trust failed with this. On the one hand, you have this company named Nerv that is clearly a stand-in for Microsoft. But then a reference is made to Bill Gates. And it’s difficult to imagine both Tim Robbins’s character and Bill Gates both being relevant in the course of the story. Particularly in a throwaway line just to show how much awesomer Robbins is than Gates.

This is an area where I have also struggled with in my own writing. The narrator of my fourth novel is a dot-com millionaire (though within the context of this universe, the term .com has been replaced with .co so that I don’t use real domains) in what is a cross between Yahoo and Google. In my first draft I made references to Google (in the context of it being more successful than the narrator’s product), but I also realized along the way that it didn’t really work. My character’s company actually does very much what Google does*. A world in which this company exists, Google would have had a hard time making its footprint. So in future versions, I’ll be stripping Google mentions. Kind of hard since “to google” has become a verb, but I’ll figure it out.

I had a similar problem in my third novel with a particular genre of music. There are a number of fictional bands mentioned prominently and unavoidably in the story. But at the same time, I also wanted to add real bands for context. My editor Kelvin called me on this, telling me that I needed to make a decision one way or the other. I’m eliminating the real bands. At least the current ones.

Perhaps the writer that understands the most of what I am talking about is Aaron Sorkin of The West Wing fame. Sorkin mentioned in an interview that NBC all but forced him to give Jay Leno a cameo. He hated the idea because Leno didn’t exist in The West Wing universe. I can imagine him trying to explain that to NBC executives. Sorkin also miraculously managed to avoid any mention of 9/11 (though they did have A Very Special Episode… but it didn’t involve planes into buildings). 24 succeeded on this front, too, which was really impressive for a show that regularly features Middle Eastern terrorists.

Of course, I write this on a blog where I am actually not entirely consistent. On one hand, I have the Trumanverse map with all manner of fictional states. On the other hand, I make references to real states. I’m not sure how to square this round hole. Mostly, if I’m talking current events, I talk real states. If I’m talking my life, I use fictitious ones. There is an in between point, though, where I want to mention my real state but can’t and so I will mention both real and fictional states in a single comment or post. However, that’s about maintaining anonymity. From an art standpoint, it’s a weakness in the Hit Coffee setup.

* - Actually, I had thought of their business model while I was in college before Google was a blip on the radar. People Lexis/Nexused other people rather than Googled them and Metacrawler was the search engine to beat. Ahhh, would that I had a few million in capital at the time!

Watching these old Dennis Hopper videos reminds me of how much I used to care about the NFL and how little I do now. I would say it’s something to do with the NFL, but I think when it comes to sports I am an all-or-nothing sort of guy. When I was a kid, it was baseball at the expense of everything else. Then at some point it became mostly NFL, though at the time I think I had time for both. Then it became college football and there was too much on my plate to spend much thought on the NFL or MLB (or, heaven forfend, the NBA).

The following contains spoilers on the eighth and final season of 24.

In some ways, the 8th Season of 24 was the most interesting. A weakness of the show, in my opinion, is that the presidents on 24 tended to fall distinctly into two categories: Good and honest presidents (Presidents Palmer, President Taylor) and terrible and dishonest presidents (President Logan, Acting President Daniels). In that sense, President Keeler struck me as the only realistic president. That’s a topic for another time, but what Season 8 did was present a real fall from grace from an erstwhile good president.

One of the things that struck me about President Taylor throughout the course of the season was that, being such a good and wholesome person, she simply didn’t know how to be dishonest. Or rather, because she was so unaccustomed to bending, she couldn’t do it without breaking. I was actually with her at first. I thought that sidelining Jack Bauer, while obviously tactically a bad move (nobody sidelines Jack Bauer), to be a reasonable move under the circumstances. He threatened a peace process that far bigger than the crimes that he wanted to expose. I really thought it was Jack Bauer that was the unreasonable one.

The problem really began not just when Bauer escaped, but when she kept trying to cover everything up afterward. One can forgive her for her misjudgment on Bauer because she doesn’t know that he’s the star of a show in which he is a force of nature. But there came a point where it was obvious that she lost control. Nevermind the morality of the situation, the threat of even an unlikely exposure by Bauer represented a far greater threat than a temporarily derailed peace process. Where the situation became entirely unsustainable was when she had the reporter jailed. At that point, it was nearly impossible to imagine that she could get away with it. Even having her killed would have resulted in too many questions being asked (Bauer’s death would have been easier to cover up).

Taylor’s ultimate problem is that by being an honest person, she couldn’t bend without breaking. She didn’t know where the line was between cutthroat politics and myopathy. Someone with more experience skirting the line would have known when it was time to cut their losses.

Of course, in the end Charles Logan didn’t pull it off, either. Sort of for the opposite problem. Unlike Taylor, Logan would have been willing to do whatever it took to keep it quiet. But without any sort of moral compass beyond expediency, Logan simply didn’t know where to draw the line for practicality’s sake. In his own warped sense of morality, he too was doing the right thing. He had his own myopathy that pushed him to do some pretty bad things not only without regard to basic morality but without a complete understanding of how perceived immorality - even if what he was doing was completely right in his own eyes - could undermine his cause.

Back to Taylor for a moment, the idea struck me somewhere after Bauer escaped and prior to Merideth Reed being jailed that there was a compromise to be struck between Taylor and Bauer. Taylor wanted her peace process and Bauer wanted his justice. Had Taylor simply been willing to look the other way while Bauer extracted justice, they both could have been satisfied. President Suvarov could not have made too many waves for fear of being exposed. Of course, when Suvarov himself was discovered to be behind it all, that would have complicated things. At that point, Taylor could have offered Bauer a plane ticket to Russia and requested that he wait until then and that he cover his tracks.

In the end, neither Taylor nor Bauer would have probably consented to The Truman Plan. It was too far outside of Taylor’s character to be so aggressively amoral for the greater good even if the alternative was to back into something worse. It’s sorta like the young couple that can rationalize having unprotected sex as spur-of-the-moment but believe bringing a condom is a sign of sin because it meant that you had planned it all along and were therefore more morally culpable. She had to be pushed into it one step at a time. And Bauer’s sense of morality would likely have made allowing Suvarov to go down in history as a respectable figure of peace (having signed both Logan’s accords as well as Taylor’s) would have been too much for him to accept. Or maybe not. The guy was a former black ops operative, so he must have had some understanding that some things are best left unexposed. That’s a harder sell when his girlfriend’s body is not yet cold, however.

I’m not sure how many of you are baseball fans, so a quick rundown of a perfect game is that it’s a game in which a pitcher (or pitchers, though to date it’s only been one) does not allow a single base hit, walk, or error. Twenty-seven up, twenty-seven down (3 outs per inning, 9 innings). Only 20 have ever been thrown in the history of baseball. It’s a big deal.

In Detroit, Armand Galarraga threw a perfect game but for a blown call on the 27th batter. That this call was blown is not contested by anybody, including the umpire that blew the call. It’s infuriating and tragic.

Some, though not the Detroit Tigers, are calling for a reversal. More are asking for expanded use of instant replay. As unfortunate as this situation is, I hope that Major League Baseball does not go this route. Blown calls are part of the game. In this case, the stakes were high, but most of the time they aren’t. The result is a game with more significant delays than baseball already has. And while it would have avoided this fiasco and perhaps other injustices, the end result is not satisfaction that the calls was fair. Most disputed calls are closer than this. Most can be reviewed for hours without a clear answer. And as with football, sometimes calls that seem clear are not reversed because they are not indisputably clear.

Right now MLB has instant replay for home run calls. I don’t know that this is a really good idea, but at least in this case it’s something that you know matters a good portion of the time. It’s a question of whether there are runs (”points”, the the baseball disinclined) or not. As far as the game itself goes, this was a single or an out. Obviously, there was a lot on the line this time, but as far as wins and losses go, a single doesn’t usually count for much. I don’t know that you can count some singles as being more important than other singles, from a rule standpoint.

Whether they expand instant replay or not, I also very much support MLB Commissioner Bud Selig and the Detroit Tigers in not asking for a reversal of the call. The rules really don’t provide for it (unless maybe there’s cheating involved) and you don’t change rules midstream.

Salon’s Matt Zoller Seitz hates superhero movies:

The comic book film has become a gravy train to nowhere. The genre cranks up directors’ box office averages and keeps offbeat actors fully employed for years at a stretch by dutifully replicating (with precious few exceptions) the least interesting, least exciting elements of its source material; spicing up otherwise rote superhero vs. supervillain storylines with “complications” and “revisions” (scare quotes intentional) that the filmmakers, for reasons of fiduciary duty, cannot properly investigate; and delivering amusing characterizations, dense stories or stunning visuals while typically failing to combine those aspects into a satisfying whole.

Contra Seitz, I disagree about the quality of superhero movies that have been coming out. In fact, I think that one of the reasons they have become such mainstays is that after twenty years they finally figured out how to make these movies. They’ve been catching up ever since. I mean, these movies are not high art. But they’re not throwaway either. For a cartoon analogy, compare He-Man to Avatar: The Last Airbender. Airbender isn’t exactly high art, but it’s obvious that between then and now studios have finally figured out how to make this stuff good. Good for what it is, anyway.

Seitz comes at this from the perspective of a movie critic and movie critics come at movies from a different perspective than the general audience. When you see so many movies, a movie’s originality takes on a whole lot more importance. Formulas become not just a negative, but actively painful. Formulaic-but-good becomes an oxymoron or sorts. I also have an appreciation for the different. It’s one of the reasons that I stopped watching superhero movies as they came out unless it was a character I really wanted to see or it was highly recommended. But that doesn’t make the movies I am not seeing bad. Nor is it, I think, damning of the genre itself.

This is the part where superhero movie fans say “If you don’t like them then don’t watch them.” The problem is that, as Ross Douthat points out, they’re affecting cinema whether you’re watching them or not.

It’s a good question, but of course once you start asking questions like that it’s a pretty short leap to wondering why we couldn’t have a movie about a Tony Stark-like figure — say, a screwball comedy about a billionaire’s romance with his omnicompetent assistant, which is basically the best thing about the “Iron Man” franchise anyway — in which he isn’t a superhero at all. And from there, it’s an even shorter leap to questions like, “what kind of movies would a clean-and-sober Robert Downey, Jr. be making if he wasn’t already signed up for ‘The Avengers’ and ‘Iron Man 3’ and the sequel to last’s year ‘Sherlock Holmes’ (which was basically a superhero flick dressed up in Victoriana)”? Or “what kind of films might Jon Favreau/Bryan Singer/Sam Raimi/Christopher Nolan have directed if they hadn’t been sucked into the superhero vortex”? Or “wouldn’t it have been nice to see a Heath Ledger/Christian Bale confrontation in which they weren’t saddled with the grim conventions of the comic-book blockbuster?” Or … well, you get the idea.

In this sense, I think that superhero movies are a sign of a larger problem. The studios are risk-averse and little without an automatic audience is getting made. Comic books have that audience. So do remakes. Further, they want a little something for everybody. Superhero movies are actually a somewhat flexible genre. They can have great romantic angles, fantasy origins, scientific origins, straight up action origins. You’ll notice that most of those appeal to a particular audience, but that’s another factor in and of itself.

The movie audience has changed. While I am skeptical of TV advertisers claiming that the young and hip demographics are the most important, I believe it when it comes to movies. As home entertainment systems get better and better, educated professionals see take themselves more and more out of the theater-going demographic. You’re left with a larger portion of your audience as young people looking for somewhere to go to, young adults with the movie for moving tickets but not surround-sound in their house, and older people that never became educated professionals. That’s not to say that smart folks over 30 have stopped seeing movies entirely, but they’re not as strong a demographic as they used to be. They are for television, though, which is why television is increasingly becoming the medium for higher art.

An interesting story about Elie Wiesel (artist and Holocaust survivor) objecting to being a character in a fictional play despite being portrayed as the exemplar of decency and morality:

[Playwright Deb Margolin] says she used Wiesel’s persona in her three-character play (which includes Madoff’s secretary) because “his name is synonymous with decency, morality, the struggle for human dignity and kindness, and in contrast to the most notorious financial criminal in the past 200 years. That’s why he was there, and I felt I had treated his character with great respect — the respect that I genuinely have felt for him.”

The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity had all its assets, $15.2 million, invested with Madoff and lost them when the Ponzi scheme unraveled. In addition, Wiesel personally lost several million dollars to Madoff.

Theater J Artistic Director Ari Roth said the Wiesel Foundation was uncomfortable with having its founder’s name used in the play, but early on Wiesel had not objected. “It wasn’t until Wiesel read the play and found it to be exactly as Deb purported, a work of fiction . . . [that] Wiesel didn’t consent to it,” Roth says.

It reminds me a bit of a difficult conversation I had a few years ago with Evangeline about a blog I was writing at the time. I had given her a pseudonym then as now, but unlike now the readership largely consisted of people that knew her. As such, mutual friend Kelvin had discovered the site and I needed to tell her about it before he did. She was not depicted as evil, but she was depicted as someone that had treated me poorly and left me in a pretty wrecked state. It was kind of the opposite of Wiesel in that the portrayal was mostly accurate but her persona was not specifically her. And unlike Wiesel, she was definitely not portrayed as an exemplar of decency.

Anyhow, after I explained it to her, she actually had no problem with it and looked forward to reading it. She said, “I am a creature of ego and not self-esteem.”

Despite the many differences with Wiesel, my mind makes the connection because of that distinction. Despite the fact that Wiesel was portrayed positively and his presence was put in a place that it never was in real life, he objected to it. He didn’t need the ego injection that Evangeline did, I suppose. The sense of being important - whether as the villain or the hero.

From a writers’ standpoint, it’s an interesting question what liberties we are and are not allowed to take. What kind of protection should celebrities and public officials have in protecting their likeness from being fictitiously portrayed? What kind of protection should private citizens have? And on citizens and public personalities, at what point does a fictional portrayal become capitalizing on someone else’s likeness, which is something we generally frown down upon. Living in a predominantly black neighborhood, Obama’s likeness was everywhere and available on every possible article of clothing. A movie was made about a fictional assassination of George W. Bush but that was okay because it was art. And obviously, a lot was fictionalized in Oliver Stone’s W. and Nixon for the sake of story. And that’s okay because, again, it’s art.

Is it different for public officials than it is for celebrities? The show 30 Rock had a plot where Jenna was going to play Janis Joplin in a biopic but they couldn’t secure the rights. What kind of rights are required (other than the rights to Joplin’s music, which the show addressed differently)? Or was 30 Rock just having fun with copyright elements that don’t actually exist?

For a writer, I really don’t know the answers to any of these questions and more like I probably should. I am in the camp of fictionalizing as much as possible. This is not news to Hit Coffee readers, but it’s also true in my fiction. The President, if portrayed, is never the actual president unless he absolutely has to be. Microsoft doesn’t exist. The movie stars will never be Tom Hanks and the dirty celebrities Paris Hilton unless it’s such a passing reference that I need the instant recognition.

One of the last things I read last night was a comment on a blog that said “DUDE! You weren’t watching Lost?! I was busy getting my mind blown. It was Claire the whole time?! What the f*ing Hell!” Knowing that the Internet was discussing the final episode of Lost that I had not seen yet, I determined that the Internet was a dangerous place to be.

Now, I didn’t know what to make of the comment about Claire. I pass it on precisely because I can inform you that nothing was ruined by that comment. I half thought at the time that it was mostly a head fake. But the next one might not be. So I spent the entire day off the Internet except for an email I sent. It turned out well because there was something that I really needed to get done. The downside is that Hit Coffee was dormant. Anyway, so lest anyone fear because I did not do my weekly Ghostland post and was silent all day today, all is right with the world.

I discovered right after having watched said episode of Lost that a friend of mind apparently ceased to exist. I know this because his Facebook profile was gone. And as we all know, if you don’t exist on Facebook you don’t exist. Fortunately, I got a Friend request from someone with the exact same name and a profile picture that was shockingly similar to my departed friend’s. So I don’t think that the old guy will be missed.

As for the episode itself… I need to think on it more before sharing my thoughts.

UPDATE: Uh oh, the third website I went to was Galley Slaves, where they had a post up about the season finale of Fringe, which I have not yet seen.