Chronicide Online

I’m being innundated with recommendations!

AFI just did another of their top 100 lists, AFI’s 10 Top 10, giving us their top ten flicks in ten different genres (animation, romantic comedies, westerns, sports, mystery, fantasy, sci-fi, gangster, courtroom drama, and epic) —which, of course, led to me and my friends at the Captain Comics board creating our own lists for those categories and more…

And then Entertainment Weekly gets a list of movies up: the top 100 movies of the past 25 years. And then Neil Gaiman points to another (non-movie, thankfully) list from EW (which, okay, I could’ve just seen from the sidebar on their previous list): the top 100 books of the past 25 years.

And suddenly I find myself swimming in things I haven’t seen or read. And that’s not even counting the other lists that have been on my “you should see these” radar: the winners of the Best Picture Oscar, and the AFI’s 100 best movies.

*sigh* If I were a smarter man, I’d just ignore everyone’s lists…

It didn’t happen during the primaries, so I’m not confident it’ll happen during the general election either, but I signed up the other day as a supporter of Science Debate 2008.

Their mission is simple:

We have noticed that science and technology lie at the center of a very large number of the policy issues facing our nation and the world – issues that profoundly affect our national and economic security as science and technology continue to transform our lives.

…

We believe a debate on these issues would be the ideal opportunity for America and the candidates to explore our national priorities on the issues, and it is hard to imagine any candidate not wishing to be involved in such an occasion.

This is a debate that I, as a science lover, would really like to see happen, so I hope they can get it going for the next few months.

If you think this is an area that requires special attention, too, why not sign up as a supporter, too. Once you’ve signed up, you’re even invited to submit questions for the (so far hypothetical) debate, so it’s even a chance to indirectly ask a question of the presidential candidates. How cool is that?

Cracked.com, purveyor of puerile lists, articles, and other web content, has put up one of their less obnoxious offerings: 20 Superhero Movies We Hope They Never Make. (If I were to guess, I’d say the reason this list is less obnoxious is because it was actually more a Photoshop contest for their readers than something they wrote themselves.) It’s got some ridiculous offerings (Ghost Rider 1910, featuring Ghost Rider on one of those olde-style bicycles; Captain France, showing a guy in a Captain America-esque costume with French iconography, fleeing from a soldier), some they-would-never-make-it adaptations (Captain Planet? Danger Mouse?), and some straight-up comic adaptations that are only humorous because of the casting (Keanu Reeves in Robin, Mike Meyers in Transmetropolitan).

Of this last category, though, one kept demanding my attention.

It’s no secret that I’m a Tim Burton fan — heck I even like (er, after a fashion) his Planet of the Apes and Batman Returns. So I kept thinking, what might a Tim Burton Avengers film look like?

(In case anyone reading this doesn’t know, the Avengers are (or were, depending on if you think the X-Men stole the slot) Marvel comics’ premiere superhero team, initially bringing together Iron Man, Thor, the Hulk, Ant-Man, and the Wasp (and, a few issues later, Captain America). Marvel’s actually got an Avengers movie in the works, which presumably will use the actors from the Iron Man and Incredible Hulk films, as well as the upcoming Ant-Man, Captain America, and Thor films. We obviously have to ignore that for this mental exercise.)

Well, Burton does love him some Johnny Depp, so I agree he would be in there. Iron Man would be the most obvious choice. But there are certain other actors he likes to re-use, too.

Helena Bonham Carter, for one. As there’s only one woman in the original Avengers, that pretty much guarantees her being cast as Wasp, yeah?

If he went back to the stars of some of his recent movies, you’ve got Mark Wahlberg (Planet of the Apes) as your Steve Rogers, aka Captain America; Ewan McGregor (Big Fish) as Henry Pym, aka Ant-Man; and Sacha Baron Cohen (Sweeney Todd) as Bruce Banner/Hulk. He could also grab Freddie Highmore (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) as the Hulk’s young partner (and the one responsible for bringing the Avengers together), Rick Jones (if he wanted to skew the character slightly younger).

Oh, and for Jarvis, Tony Stark’s – and, therefore, the Avengers’ – butler (played by a robot in the Iron Man movie), I figure he’d go with one of two other Burton favorites: either Michael Gough (which would then make him probably the only actor to have played two butlers-to-the-superheroes) or Jeffrey Jones. Gough, although awesome, is also 94, a little too old for the part, so I’m going to go with Jones on this one.

And that just leaves us Thor. I’m really not sure where to go with this one, but looking through some other Burton movies, I’ll hearken back to Sleepy Hollow and grab one of its antagonists: Casper Van Dien. (A bit more wildcard casting might take Big Fish‘s Billy Crudup in this role, too…)

Once you’ve got the team lineup, you need an enemy. Loki, as played by Paul Reubens? Ultron, the evil, sentient robot created by Ant-Man, as played (or at least voiced) by Christopher Walken? Actually, I like both of those, and they could work together (Loki’s mischief brings Pym’s invention to life and turns it evil…).

So there you have it. My proposal:

THE AVENGERS
a TIM BURTON film

Staring
Mark Wahlberg ………….. Steve Rogers/Captain America
Johnny Depp ……………… Tony Stark/Iron Man
Ewan McGregor ………….. Hank Pym/Ant-Man
Helena Bonham Carter … Janet Van Dyne/The Wasp
Sacha Baron Cohen …….. Bruce Banner/The Hulk
Casper Van Dien ………… Thor
Paul Reubens …………….. Loki
Christopher Walken ……. Ultron
Freddie Highmore ………. Rick Jones
Jeffrey Jones ……………… Jarvis

When this comes out, I want a cut of the profits (that’s gross, not net, in case any Hollywood types are reading this.)

[This is a somewhat expanded version of a post I first made on the Captain Comics Message Board.]

Okay, just saw this and it troubles me…

It’s not so much that McCain is a technological illiterate (though, of course, that doesn’t seem to me a good thing for a world leader in 2008 to be), but that he admits as much and can’t – won’t? – even answer the “Mac vs. PC” question, one that’s been an entry-level tech questions for…man, must be 20 years now, strikes me as particularly… Ignorant? Out of touch? I don’t even know.

I mean, seriously. It’s not like he’s being asked Facebook vs. MySpace; that one I wouldn’t necessarily expect him to have an answer for.

Sheesh. Where’s he been the past 20 years? An isolated wilderness?

…oh, that’s right, he has been in an isolated wilderness for 20 years; he’s been a member of Congress since ’83.

I don’t know a lot about rap artist and all-around creative guy RZA, but what I do know of him (or, rather, his work) I like. One thing to add to the things I like about him that I just learned today is he wants to be a scientist:

But what Wu-Tang Clan mastermind, established solo artist, actor, soundtrack composer and author RZA really wants to do is become a one-man U.S. government think tank. … “I was talking to my wife about this recently. I was like, ‘Yo, don’t you think [the government] should just hire me and put me in a research lab for ten years so I can just research something?’”

Pretty cool, right? Except that, he then goes to show that maybe he doesn’t quite know how science works:

But he seems to be pretty serious about the concept. “All these f—ing ideas I got in the scientific world, they just not being heard because I’m a musician. That’s kind of weird.”

One of the beautiful things about science is that anyone can do it: you don’t have to be a Government-Certified Scientist™ to get your ideas out, you just have to do the science. If your theories are sound, and if your science holds, it will be heard. (Okay, it’s not quite that easy, since you’d have to get your ideas before some sort of review board to get published, but there are even ways around that. I mean, if the ID crowd can get their “science” out there…)

The thing is, in its way, it can’t be that different than the music scene that RZA is a part of. It’s not like, in the flipside, there’s some researcher sitting in his lab saying, “All these great songs I got in me, and they’re just not being heard because I’m a scientist.” If the scientist really has great songs, and he goes out and makes them and gets people to listen to them, they’ll be heard.

As hard as that is, it’s really that easy.

Talk about disappointing! The May 1 issue of Library Journal came across my desk today, and the cover promised content that would be right up my alley: Parallel Worlds.

Look at that cover: all fantasy and cool and surreal. I was looking forward to a good, library-related article about the trends in alternate reality fiction, recommendations of good works to build a collection of such books, and etc. I was actually, truth be told, expecting it to be this story, mentioned on Neil Gaiman’s blog recently, about “books on fantastic cities and urban magic.”

So imagine my disappointment when, finally sitting down with the magazine this evening and opening to the cover story, I find an article on Web 2.0 instead. I initially reacted with disbelief: “Obviously,” I told myself, “this isn’t the cover article, but rather just an article along the same theme as the cover.” But flipping through found nothing else (not surprising, as Library Journal usually only has one main article, with the rest of the magazine filled with book reviews)

At this point, my only consolation is to imagine that, in some other reality somewhere, an alternate me is picking up a copy of this magazine and being rewarded with the article I was expecting to find in this reality. It’s cold comfort, but hey: at least I get my parallel world.

Whew!

I’m finally free from the yoke of LiveJournal. Not that LiveJournal was bad; it was actually pretty good to me. But it wasn’t what I really wanted from a blog, so it didn’t feel very encouraging to post to it. (At least, that’s the rationalization I’m using for why I didn’t post much…)

But I’ve finally got my own domain set up, and I’ve got WordPress installed (though I’m still working on the design), so I’m hoping this will kick my butt into actually using this blog.

And what am I going to put in here? Well, I haven’t decided yet, but to keep my ambitions big, these are the type of things I imagine I might do:

• Reviews – Comics, movies, books, TV…I love them all, and I want to start crystallizing my thoughts about them (right now I find I move on too easily to the next one, so they don’t stick as well as they might), and reviews seems a good way to do that. Not sure yet what format these reviews’ll take…
• Opinions – Of course; what blog is worth its salt without lots of opinion. A bit of politics, a bit of religion, a bit of sociology…whatever pops in my mind, really.
• Random Observations – Really not any different from “Opinions”, is it?
• Short Fictions – This is…a challenge for me, as I’m not entirely comfortable creating (let alone sharing!) fiction, but I’ll try to give it a try.

That’s what I’m thinking, anyhow. Watch for categories to form as these (or other) content items start appearing.

Aaaand…that’ll probably do for now. I’ve already got an idea for a first (real) post, so you’ll see that shortly. Hope to see you back, and hope to have regular new content for you to enjoy!

Chronicide Online 2.0, really, as this is (or will be) replacing the LiveJournal blog.

It’s all good, really.