I had a strange thought the other day, as I occasionally do, and it led me through an odd chain of conclusions. That germinative thought was “why do we call someone who rapes a rapist and not a raper¹?”

There are many ists out there, and the four definitions of the suffix at wiktionary seem to cover all the typical cases, but it seems a stretch to consider rapist as any of them.

The first definition says it signifies a system of belief. Perhaps to some rape is a way of life, but is the act itself an expression of a belief system?

The second possibility is that it describes a profession or field of interest. I can’t imagine many making a living through their rape, nor it being a field of interest for anyone.

The third is that it’s something a person uses. This is a pretty vague definition so it seems the most likely candidate for the origin of ‘rapist’ as a term. Rape is often said to be an exertion of power and dominance over people. In prison, and elsewhere, rape is a weapon used to control people. Still, this seems like a fairly substantial allegorical stretch.

Finally, it could mean it’s a biased view of some sort. Admittedly, raping someone probably means your preferences are biased in your favour but is committing the act of rape equivalent to the personal belief that a specific subset of humanity is less than another? I don’t deny that rapists might frequently be sexist, but does that make rape itself an ist?

So while, none of these really fit ‘rapist’ as well as I’d like, a common thread in these definitions is that all these ists are what a person is. It is something that defines them. Put simply, ers are what you do, ists are who you are. There might be a few exceptions to this, but rules always have exceptions.

But let’s overthink the implications of this linguistic hint briefly. Is it a coincidence that Ist sounds like His and Er sounds like Her? Is there a subtly sexist/chauvinist theme carried through the implied nature of ist? That things that are described by an ist are more robust, more steadfast, than the fickle actions of an er? Are we tacitly endorsing an ist every time we use an ist? No, probably not, but thinking about and subsequently overthinking these sorts of things is just what I do.

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1. Shortly after I had this thought, I came to a place in George RR Martin’s A Feast for Crows where someone is called a “raper” and wondered what that implied about the act of rape in that world. [↩]

Watching the television bloggers unleash the expected criticism on Rubicon I’m reminded once more that criticism in the television realm still has a long way to go.

A guest-blogger over at Alyssa Rosenberg’s blog wrote about Rubicon echoing the common complaint, that the show is too slow. My issues lie not with her distaste for the pace, but with a tack-on statement that feels very wrong to me:

Rubicon needs some adjustments if it’s going to attract and keep viewers.

I think it’s true that Rubicon will likely draw a meager audience — though the inherent sexiness of conspiracy theories will probably entice a few people who would not otherwise watch a show of its caliber — but I think a better question is, “Is it any good?”

I understand that ratings are what keep shows alive, but I don’t think it’s too much to expect criticism of a show to be based on the merits of the show. Any related punditry about the politics of television renewal is similarly valuable — TV by the Numbers is one of my favourite television blogs — but they are two wholly separate endeavours.

There are certain shows and types of shows that will simply never be a huge success¹. Rubicon is not a common denominator show, and probably wouldn’t get big ratings even if it were the best conspiracy theory show ever made. Critics should be judging it from within that rubric, not aiming to nudge it into another. Movie critics don’t argue that slow cerebral thrillers should have more action sequences, why should television critics?

If you don’t like a certain genre or style or aesthetic, that’s fine. Make that preference clear. If you think a show is moving slowly, say so. Explain how your suggestions would improve the show’s quality. But don’t argue it needs to change in order to increase its ratings.

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1. Exceptions like Lost and The Big Bang Theory, both shows that seem targeted at niches small enough that they have no right to be so successful, are obviously exceptions to the rule. [↩]

Not long ago, I was linked to a Facebook page advertising a prospective science fiction cable network called The Syzygy Network. Notwithstanding the awkward name¹ I’m still wary of introducing another genre specific television channel.

I’m Canadian so I get Space not SyFy; because of that, I haven’t experienced the tonal shift that SyFy is attempting, but when you read news about the channel picking up broadcast rights for WWE events and creating reality TV shows it’s easy to understand the audience frustration. But I don’t think a new channel will do anything but delay the inevitable. Capitalism being what it is, Mission Creep is always going to happen with niche television stations. It’s better to accept the changes while fighting for your particular interests to still be considered rather than run off and start your own channel. Maybe it’s the issues I have with The Tea Party and its cultural warriors — creating their own party because their already backwards party wasn’t backwards enough — but I think this sort of fragmentation is a bad thing.

I hate to reference the discussion among sane(r) conservatives regarding epistemic closure² but it has a certain relevance to the discussion; granted, a large group of people getting their political news from a single biased source isn’t quite the same as nerds wanting a genre-focused television channel, but that doesn’t change the broader implications embedded in that isolation.

One of the biggest problems inherent in niche television channels is ghettoification. By creating a channel dedicated to generating science fiction, you make it that much easier for larger networks to give up on science fiction for good, leaving that sort of content in the closed off ghetto of niche television. Television viewers will think less of content that can’t survive the ‘free market’ of network television, where broad appeal supposedly determines success.

I think there’s precedent for this in novels; no one thought less of HG Wells for writing science fiction, because the genre didn’t really exist, yet now when prominent authors write novels that are obviously science fiction they as work as hard as they can to deny it³.

When you look at the history of science fiction on television, there were a lot of fantastic shows that made their way through the traditional network model. And they had budgets that expressed that. The Syzygy Network is already stating they cannot produce any original content for the first five years of operation, and after that any original content they produce will doubtless be made with as frugal a budget as possible, something of a detriment in a genre dedicated to exploring the edges of possibility⁴.

I might simply be tilting at windmills here. General practitioners are becoming less common, replaced by specialists dedicating their lives to one particular subject. As Matt Ridley explains in his brilliant TED Talk, no one person knows how to make most of the products we rely on every day. The global scale is expanding faster than ever, but the individual remains mostly locked into a much narrower scope. The more there is to know, the more individuals must focus on a single field; the more there is to watch, the more people must make active decisions about the content they consume.

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1. One of my first thoughts upon reading the name was to jump right to famously horrific train wreck of a film, Zyzzyx Rd, known for having one of the smallest box offices ever: a grand total of $20. [↩]
2. The number of times that phrase was repeated in political blogs was maddening. [↩]
3. I myself am guilty of this thinking on occasion. When I talk about Infinite Jest, I tend not to describe it as a science fiction novel, despite it carrying many of the fundamental attributes of science fiction, because it feels like it’s more than “just” a science fiction novel. [↩]
4. I’m not saying science fiction requires astronomical budgets, but certain types of science fiction are vastly aided by them. [↩]

This will be the third post about Lost’s finale in a row, and my first post in over a month¹, but I found this paragraph hidden inside an X-Files review on the AV Club to so perfectly summarize my thoughts on the answers Lost gave us²:

As Lost was winding toward its conclusion and it became more and more apparent that not all of the series’ big questions were going to be answered, it touched off a bit of fan discussion about just how much needs to be tied up to make a satisfying ending. I realize that my position on these things is a bit unlike most other people who watch this sort of stuff for fun or a living, but, officially, I don’t care. If the story just keeps getting bigger and bigger and more nebulous, fine. Pile mysteries on top of mysteries until the groaning weight of the artifice topples in on itself. So long as the character stuff and the plotting are generally tight on an episode-by-episode level, I kind of LIKE it when things get so big that they seem to encompass all of human existence.

Exactly.

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1. New job, new projects, blah blah blah, I need to stop being lazy. [↩]
2. Well, as I’ve said before, I think Lost gave us a lot more answers than most of the fans give it credit for, but the sentiment of this quote is dead on. [↩]

The most annoying thing about the divide that’s evolved within the Lost community is that the two sides are total opposites. I think the show was absolutely a character-based drama first, but I also think that pretty much all the answers people are talking about the show not answering actually were answered. No, they weren’t spoon-fed into you through explicit statements, but the information is there within the content of the show to answer all the questions you have. Or all the ones I can think of.

I won’t list all the “unanswered” questions I’ve read over the last week or so, but I haven’t found one that wasn’t already answered by the show or completely ridiculous and not worth answering.

Watching Lost come to an end was a spectacular event. This show has rocked me each season with its complex storytelling, bizarre mythology, and emotional heft.

The very first episode I saw — I ignored the show at first because ABC’s early marketing made it look really really stupid — was “…In Translation” and I watched it totally unaware of what show it was or any past relations for the character. The episode focused on Sun and Jin, and when it ended I thought it was one of the best hours of television I’d seen in a long time. Following that I went back and watched Lost from the beginning, quickly becoming a die-hard acolyte.

During those early years, I was one of those guys that theorized all the time, I’d discuss with friends my thoughts about what The Dharma Initiative was all about, why there were Egyptian hieroglyphs, and why it was that you couldn’t find the Island.

I don’t know when it happened, though, but somewhere along the way I realized that I could answer most of those questions myself, and it was probably more fun to not get definitive answers. What I really ended up caring about was the characters. I actually don’t really remember caring about characters all that much before Lost; I’m sure I had some understanding of it before Lost, but it was certainly during the time Lost was airing that I grew more and more interested in how characters grow, and how a show can service them rather than the other way around. It’s entirely possible that Lost was the thing that made me realize that television was about more than filling a half-hour with jokes or constructing a clever murder mystery to be unraveled.

And so, Lost ended tonight. And it’s final moments were about — what else? — the characters.

I think it’s easy to criticize Lost for not giving enough answers to its mythology, but it’s also pointless. Those sorts of answers will always be, in some very important ways, arbitrary. We’ve seen this throughout Lost’s run when big questions are answered, two from this season in particular are the explanations for The Rules and The Numbers. This is absolutely intentional on the writers part.

What could possibly be a rational answer for the numbers 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, and 42 constantly showing up in the characters lives? There is none, it’s just something to signify that these people are connected in important ways.

So much of the mythology of Lost is ultimately unimportant; all that matters is that these people were brought to the Island for a reason — to protect it — and the Island is a very special place. Anything else is merely an extension of those two fundamental principles.

It’s less important what these people do than why they do it. Watching Lost, you learn who these people are, and you come to see each of them as a flawed person seeking resolution, seeking redemption, seeking some meaning. Basically, they’re real people.

I think that almost every action a character has performed during the run of this remarkable series had come from them, not from some need from the writer¹, and the show has been much stronger for that reason.

Trying to talk about the finale that just aired is essentially impossible. People who haven’t watched the show before will be baffled, and the people who have watched it for years are mostly trapped between two positions: the finale didn’t answer anything, and the finale gave us all the answers we need. These two positions are surprisingly not actually mutually exclusive, they’re just the expression of two different types of fans. Some people are here for the mythology and others are here for the characters.

People are absolutely right that the finale didn’t answer anything. Nobody was sat down and told the history of the Island, nor where the mechanics or the Donkey Wheel explained or the power of The Source. There were no long drawn-out scenes explaining why the Island needs protecting, who created it, why it was special, where it came from or anything even approaching that.

But a lot of us really didn’t care about that. We were much more interested in knowing if Kate will ever declare her love for one of her two lovers², or what will Jack do now that he’s the new Jacob, or if all the pain and suffering the survivors have gone through really had meaning.

To that second group, we were inundated by answers. Kate finally fessed up to loving Jack, just as they part ways for the rest of their lives. Jack risked the Island in order to finally kill the Man in Black and then heroically sacrificed himself to save the Island, and by implication the world. And yes, all the hardship and pain these people went through, it was worth it; completely ignoring the flashes sideways, which I’ll discuss in a few moments, those people grew from the shallow self-serving people they started as into fully realized people who were part of a community. They all came to be part of a larger whole, and that community is what ultimately gave Jack the strength to sacrifice himself for them, for their memory, and for the world they all left behind when they crashed on that Island.

Aside from that long-term schism, the finale has opened a new idea for fans to be divided on: the flashes sideways³. I’m not entirely sure what people were looking for out of the flashes sideways, I’m not sure what I was looking for. My basic metric was that I wanted them to mean something, I wanted them to matter in some way. I think that the flashes sideways being an ethereal staging ground for the survivors to find each other so they could go off to some sort of afterlife together probably works. Going over the season with that knowledge at hand is probably necessary to really see if everything that happened needed to be there.

For the moment, I’m gobsmacked. I wept through the closing scenes where all the castaways reunited across time and space to essentially die together. I don’t know if it will really work in the long term, but right now I’m more than satisfied. I can’t wait to watch it all again.

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1. Obviously, the layer above that is that these characters were given these traits and character arcs precisely because the writer’s needed those characteristics for future plot points, but that doesn’t negate that their actions, in and of themselves, were internally consistent. [↩]
2. I know a lot of Lost fans hate Kate fervently, but I like her character a lot and I think her open declaration of Love in tonight’s episode was one of her bravest moments in the series. [↩]
3. I pluralize that shit like a classy motherfucker. [↩]

Party Down is one of those secret shows that is truly impressive but can’t seem to find a real audience. The arc of the first season was very strongly about knowing when to give up your dream, and why that’s not necessarily the worst thing in the world. The second season, based on the most recent episode, Steve Guttenberg’s Birthday, seems to be exploring the idea that dreams never die, and why that’s probably the best thing in the world.

Henry, played by Adam Scott, is an actor who gave up on his career after giving it his all for as long as he thought he could last. Each episode centers around a party or event being catered by Henry’s new employer, a catering company whose employees are mostly people struggling for their first big break in Hollywood.

Along with Henry¹ are: Casey, a potential up-and-coming comic; Roman, a hard science fiction writer who feels above anyone and everyone; and Kyle, a pretty-boy actor. In the first season Henry is portrayed as the end result of Hollywood, someone who’s given up on their dreams. But despite this seemingly grim theme, season one is about Henry finding a place for himself without that all-encompassing passion. He finds someone to care for with Casey and finds himself more and more comfortable with being a caterer for the rest of his life, so long as there’s someone there to share it with.

But season one ended with Casey leaving him to follow her dream, to look for that big break somewhere else, him being promoted to manager of a team of caterers, and essentially no passion left in him. It was funny to see, but also tragic. We all look for some meaning in our life, and just as Henry had adjusted to a new meaning, it left to be a stand-up comic on a six-month long Alaskan cruise.

Season two brings us back around six months later and Henry is still recovering from the hurt Casey gave him and the sadness of his humdrum existence. In this episode, Steve “The Gute” Guttenberg happens to have a movie in his DVD collection that Henry had a small role in, which perks Casey’s curiosity. At the same time, The Gute encourages the crew to perform a reading of Roman’s recently rejected script, in the hopes of giving Roman ideas for improvement. These two plots manage to pack in a lot of really great themes and character growth into a few short scenes.

By Casey sneaking off to see Henry’s early work as an actor she realizes that he’s actually a really great actor, one who probably shouldn’t have given up on his dream. Casey’s desire to see Henry follow that dream is probably related to her recent success via a small role in an Apatow movie, but it nonetheless points to that larger idea.

And when Henry performs the improved version of Roman’s script — earnestly performing the material due to Casey goading him into it in order to, in my opinion, see if he can still act as well as he once did — we also learn that he’s actually a great actor. More than that, we see that he obviously misses it.

The question you have to ask now — well, this is a half-hour comedy so I guess you don’t have to do any of this analysis but this is what I live for — is what it is that gives us meaning. In the first season, Henry was looking for it in the people around him, and in love. Now, it’s not so clear that that’s enough.

I know that Adam Scott will have, at best, a limited role in any potential third season of the show, which has probably driven some of my thoughts and speculation about the direction of the season, but it seems to me that a really smart way to end this season would be to have Henry reaffirm his desire to be an actor and go off to pursue that dream. Or if they push that earlier in the season, maybe ending the season with his new big break, the one that will catapult him to real fame (and maybe next season he’ll host a few parties so he can hang with his old catering buddies). But whatever they do, I hope the show continues to explore these sorts of interesting themes in a new season, even without Henry there — though, at the moment, I can’t imagine the show being anywhere near as compelling without him there.

Party Down is a light-comedy centred around real characters and that juxtaposition makes it, like Parks and Recreation, one of those subdued comedies that manages to make you laugh at the same time as they explore romance and life in really important ways.

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1. There are other regular cast members but these particular characters exemplify the themes I’m exploring in this post. [↩]

I get sometimes when people have legitimate criticisms of a show. Even a show as good as Lost, it’s possible to not like at times, maybe because you can think a character’s motivation is weak or maybe for some other wrong¹ reason.

What you can’t do is whine like a petulant child when something you don’t like happens.

Tonight’s episode was absolutely amazing. The story raced along, the characters were all playing in their wheelhouse and their emotions felt true. Nobody behaved out of character². What happened tonight is what had to happen, even if it’s not what you think should have happened or what you would’ve liked to happen.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go cry for a while.

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1. I didn’t say your criticisms were correct. [↩]
2. I want to talk more about why the particular actions that occurred make sense for the characters, but I won’t do that tonight; this post is mostly about venting over the vitriolic hatred some Lost fans are spewing about this episode. [↩]

A huge chunk of television lives on the will-they-won’t-they romance, and most shows never consummate that relationship, keeping the romantic tension omnipresent but never too explicit.

A recent addition to this group of series is Doctor Who. Two of the last three companions have had romantic feelings toward The Doctor¹ and the most recent companion, Amy Pond, has continued the trend with gusto. Which is where the angry fans get involved.

Many² fans are angry that every companion since Russell T Davies rebooted the show has been a potential paramour; I think it’s probably less than ideal if every companion is like this, but at the same time I’m much more interested in how it works for each individual case and I think the way they’ve handled Amy Pond’s infatuation with The Doctor has so far been pitch perfect.

But going a step farther, I think the new dynamic that has been established since the show returned is a more realistic one. A brilliant, intelligent man brings you around through time on fantastic adventures; do you expect anyone to not fall in love with the guy?

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1. Some people claim that even Donna Noble had romantic tension with The Doctor; maybe I just hate Donna Noble too much to see that. [↩]
2. I know that’s a weasel word, and I’m not linking to any specific critiques, but I don’t feel like looking them up; they’re out there. [↩]

I finally got around to watching Kick-Ass and, having had the opportunity to read the comic not long ago, the movie was an enlightening experience¹. Spoilers for the movie and the comic follow.

Tonally, this movie took a lot of the more cynical moments of the comic and softened them. I don’t know if the movie needed to remove all of those little touches, but there are some that probably had to be made. For example, in the comic Big Daddy and Hit Girl’s mob crusade is a total sham; Hit Girl’s mother is not dead, Big Daddy wasn’t a cop or a hit man or anything like that, Big Daddy was an accountant-by-day comic nerd-by-night who used his comic collection to fund his crusade and essentially brainwashed his kid into becoming a ruthless assassin in order to have fun. It’s an interesting deconstruction of the superhero mythos, but a tad depressing and almost anti-comics in sentiment for a comic book movie.

Another thing the movie brightened up was Dave’s romance. In the movie, as in the comic, Dave pretends to be gay to get close to this girl, Katie, who wants a gay best friend. The movie differs broadly here as well. In the comic, Katie is more explicitly using Dave and never demonstrates much interest in him; when he reveals that he’s not gay and in fact is basically in love with her, she beats the shit out of him and then gets her boyfriend to beat more shit out of him.

The movie fleshes Katie out more, she becomes interested in Dave over time expressing regret that he’s gay, and even becomes a comic book fan; when he reveals to her that he’s not gay — he also reveals that he’s Kick-Ass to her, which makes the way she takes it somewhat more realistic, and also heightens the drama during the later action pieces — she’s briefly pissed but quickly warms to him, both emotionally and physically. Basically, they fuck a lot², and though the ease with which she takes his confession doesn’t read as believably as I’d like, the relationship works in the big picture.

Basically, what Matthew Vaughn did when writing the screenplay was extract large chunks of Mark Millar’s misogyny, nihilism, and misanthropy. Obviously, there’s a degree to which this was done to make the movie more marketable, but I think even more than that the plot changes were done because the original comic lacked heart. The movie, much more than the comic, wants to be about more than just being a super-hero because it’s cool. Maybe it should’ve been uncompromising and brutal and accused the audience of being sociopaths for ever dreaming about being a super-hero but that movie almost certainly would’ve sucked.

Beyond the changes that occurred in the general plot, one thing that changed pretty drastically in terms of the way the story was told was the lack of flashbacks. Comic books operate similar to serialized television in most ways, and one aspect in particular is the cliffhanger ending; when a comic ends on a cliffhanger — like, say, Hit Girl and Big Daddy demolishing a bunch of drug dealers and running off into the night — the next issue can be devoted to explaining these new characters, their back story, and why they’re doing what they’re doing. The big reveal of the new amazing character, emerging complete from the shadows, it’s one of the cornerstones of comics and so it’s not surprising that Kick-Ass used it a couple times.

In Kick-Ass, it’s used first to fill in the back story of Hit Girl and Big Daddy³ and then later on to reveal that Red Mist was working with the Mob to set a trap for Hit Girl and Big Daddy. This style is great because it lets certain events come at you unexpectedly; in the film both of these things are integrated into the linear plot⁴ and so they feel slightly deflated. Granted, a good story should stay a good story regardless of any storytelling temporal tricks you plan, but that doesn’t mean those tricks can’t enhance the story.

The compressed story lines required for film are at times a crucible from which a tighter story is extracted, but in the process it’s easy to lose something.

Seeing as I’m here, I’ll write a brief paragraph about the fight scenes in Kick-Ass⁵. Hit Girl killing countless mob goons was a sight to behold, but I think that the best fight scene in the movie, hands down, is the one where Big Daddy destroys that group of goons at the lumber factory and then sets it all on fire. Every movement in that scene feels so visceral, the way Big Daddy trundles relentlessly through the gunfire felt so much more genuine than the highly choreographed (albeit impressive) fights with Hit Girl.

Ultimately, I think the film is stronger than the comic, both because of the changes to the basic plot and in spite of the loss of certain comic book storytelling traits. You should go see it if you haven’t already, though if you’ve read this entire post but haven’t seen the movie, well I kinda fucked that plan up for you, didn’t I?

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1. It was also a very entertaining movie, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to resort to that lame pun everyone seems to be bandying about. And no, the title of this post is not an example of said pun it’s— oh look over there, a squirrel! [↩]
2. And I’m totally willing to admit I giggled with glee when she said she wanted to fuck Kick-Ass and then promptly made up an excuse to go fuck Dave. [↩]
3. Well, the first version of the back story, the ending reveals that the first version was a fiction thought up by Big Daddy. [↩]
4. Aside from a comic book animation sequence that gives a little more history to Big Daddy. [↩]
5. I’m still not going to use that pun, though [↩]

Not long ago, I expressed worry about Chuck’s future now that the will-they/won’t-they romance has been resolved. With one episode down and five to go, I think the writers are on the right path.

So far, at least, the show seems quite content to let Chuck and Sarah just be happy while being spies. And rightly so! It seems odd to me that no show that I can recall aside from the American version of The Office has had the long-term romance solidify and continue telling stories. Emotional connections are perhaps harder to establish with fictional characters when a romance isn’t one of the balls in the air, but conversely, storytelling is not merely the act of introducing sadness to people’s lives.

This isn’t to say that they need to be a perfect couple forever from here on out, but at the very least they have avoided for the time being the trap of the quick and implausible relationship collapse. I can’t wait to see how the rest of this season plays out¹.

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1. Oh, also, the season’s winding down, the ratings are still unremarkable, and the show continues to be one of the best shows on right now. In conclusion… Start Watching Chuck, Dammit! [↩]

I don’t think anyone would ever call John Gruber a critic of Apple¹, but his bashing of Gizmodo with regards to their scoop on the next generation of iPhone is getting pretty ridiculous.

A recent post on his blog, Daring Fireball, asserts that what Gizmodo did was theft because the person who found the lost prototype didn’t contact the bar, where the Apple engineer who lost the phone inquired a few times as to its whereabouts, but that seems like a pretty arbitrary standard to follow. The person who found the phone — and in turn Gizmodo, who purchased the phone from them, because of the laws in California — is only guilty of theft if they don’t try to return the lost item to its owner, and the wording of the law seems intentionally vague, stating that the efforts undertaken to return it should be deemed “reasonable.” Were the phone calls with Apple employees informing them that he had a prototype phone — phone calls which were completely ignored by Apple, at least in part because Apple’s overly tight-lipped procedures left no-one aware a phone had been lost or that a new iPhone existed in any form at all — not reasonable? They seem quite reasonable to me.

Granted, maybe he should have contacted the bar, but not contacting the bar is not an inherently malicious act, it’s not the subtle machinations of someone hoping to feign ‘reasonableness’ when asked later while still scoring a payday from their discovery. It’s human error. Hindsight is 20/20.

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1. I personally don’t consider him a fanboy for Apple, but rather an apologist, a distinction worth making and perhaps worth clarifying in a later post. [↩]

Spartacus: Blood and Sand finished off their first season a couple nights ago and while I had early reservations, mostly related to the gratuitousness of the nudity and violence, the season came together in a really satisfying way. The violence is still ridiculous at times, the nudity and sexuality is often overdone, but the characters survive through those faults. It shouldn’t be a surprise that the show is strongly written, seeing as its creator is Steven S. DeKnight, a veteran of a number of quality television shows. Even more than that, the show was blessed with having Daniel Knauf, creator of one of the best television shows ever made, as a consulting producer.

But I think it’s safe to say that Spartacus snuck up on people with its quality; it’s left me interested in the second season, and pondering where the characters will go before their preordained end. On a related note, it seems as though the show’s name has been retconned as Spartacus, with a season subtitle of Blood and Sand, to allow for the second season to shift out of the gladiatorial ring with the new subtitle Vengeance. So I look forward to Spartacus: Vengeance, though I do hope the show is more willing to forgo the over-the-top violence and sexuality¹ now that it’s found strong characters to base the show around.

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1. The more recent episodes have come with a disclaimer telling viewers the violence and sexuality is there to portray a realistic representation of Ancient Rome, but HBO’s Rome didn’t whitewash the dingier parts of Ancient Rome without having such profuse and omnipresent nudity and violence, so some of it is clearly there for the sake of grabbing attention, and it’s that aspect of the show that I think could go away fairly easily. [↩]

Insane Clown Posse is insane and so despite how much they enjoy the miracles¹ of the natural world, the operational mechanics of magnets continue to elude them. But they’re not alone.

It’s easy to say that magnets emit a magnetic field, but when you get down to it, that statement that needs more explanation. What is a magnetic field, and more importantly why does it cause that repulsion and attraction. The strange truth about most things we take as a given is that there are scads of underlying assumptions we ignore because at some point it’s easier to just take it as a given.

That’s not to say there aren’t people out there who truly understand magnetism, but chances are you’re not one of them.

Feynman’s ‘explanation’ of magnetism via a chain of questions running down into more and more general and fundamental truths reminds me of this great bit by Louis CK:

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1. Miracle in this instance meaning things science has explained quite well, but are still ‘magical’ in the poetic sense. [↩]

Yesterday, when I wrote about that Insane Clown Posse song, I said “you can’t deny that they’re right about this one.” Now, obviously that’s not right¹. These guys, and this song, are wrong in many ways about many things. They have a line expressing anger about scientists lying to them about how magnets work²!

But despite their horrible music, and bizarre stances, they got it right that nature is pretty great. Law of averages, I guess.

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1. And the over-the-top title was little more than a lame reference to an awesome show. [↩]
2. Really, I think the line is supposed to invoke some Creationist anger against the scientifically valid theory of Evolution, but if you didn’t know the members of Insane Clown Posse were devout Christians — and who could blame you for not knowing that based on their profuse profanity and bizarre clown make-up — it’s easy to just imagine them hearing a scientist describe the way magnets work and getting super pissed because they the explanation was lame and/or confusing. [↩]