How dumb is George W. Bush?

We now have a quantifiable answer to the most important question of our age.

On August 14, Bush gave a statement at the State Department and then took questions after.

Here is one of the questions and his answer, as highlighted by Juan Cole:

QUESTION: How can the international force, or the United States if necessary, prevent Iran from resupplying Hezbollah?

BUSH: The first step is -- and part of the mandate in the U.N.resolution was to secure Syria's borders. Iran is able to ship weapons to Hezbollah through Syria. . . . In other words, part of the mandate and part of the mission of the troops, the UNIFIL troops, will be to seal off the Syrian border.

And here's Max "MaxSpeak" Sawicky's demonstration of exactly how dumb this means Bush is.

( Dumb Now for the future! )

The triumph of the future

I do a lot of my blog-reading during slow minutes at work, and since I don't have a private office or headphones, I usually don't follow links to music and/or videos unless I'm at home; and I often forget to follow up on those links for a few days.

Thus, I missed most of the discussion of Jim Steinman's unspeakably evil, brain-destroying magnum opus* "Total Eclipse of the Heart" and its various versions and videos which erupted on Making Light early this month, spinning off a discussion of Hurra Torpedo's brilliant re-imagining of the song. "Hurra Torpedo is the world's leading kitchen appliance rock group", as their web site says; the video is here (WMV file).

*As I was contemplating this sentence, I realized that Jim Steinman has a lot in common with Jim Starlin: a compelling, technically proficient style wedded with an addiction to grand Romantic terms like "freedom", "madness", and "passion" divorced from the actual human moments that give them meaning; and an absolutely adolesent certainty that what they're doing is the most important thing evar. So if anyone ever feels the need to produce Thanos: The Musical, I think we have our composer/lyricist lined up.

Eventually, the discussion moved around to the original video for the Bonnie Tyler rendition of the song. Two spin-off comments amused me greatly (in addition to Teresa's valiant but doomed, DOOMED!, attempt to make narrative sense of the video). One was from my evil twin agrumer, who said this on his own LJ:

Bonnie Tyler’s 1983 video for “Total Eclipse of the Heart” was the world’s first shojou manga music video. Seriously, you could probably redo 98% of it with footage out of Revolutionary Girl Utena.

It's scary how right he is.

The other, larger, comment is from Chad Orzel. After pointing to thirteen different homemade video versions on YouTube, he says:

Ultimately, this is the answer to Charlie Stross's query about why nobody writes near-future SF any more: because this is what you have to compete with. Presented with revolutionary, world-spanning communications technology, and the ability to instantly retrieve information from an astonishing array of sources, and send it to any of a truly mind-boggling number of people, this is what we use it for.

Futurism never stood a chance.

Two responses to that:

First, Vernor Vinge did sorta-kinda predict people using their networked home computers to make unauthorized videos; it was in his 1967 story "The Accomplice". But he wasn't quite predicting anything as batshit insane as upside-down chins lip-synching to overblown rock cantatas; I think you have to go to Bruce Sterling to get that, and he had the advantage of being a lot closer to the actual thing happening.

Second, it has become a commonplace of sf's self-congratulatory discourse over the last few years to say that science fiction has conquered the world. I believe it hasn't. I believe that the real victor in the battle for the minds of the world is surrealism. What catches the attention is not "the future"; it is "the novel". This explains why, even in the Golden Age when Real Men wrote Real Science Fiction for Real Readers with Real Cosmic Minds, Ray Palmer's Amazing consistently outsold John W. Campbell's Astounding and why the most popular writers in Astounding were, for long stretches, A. E. van Vogt and L. Ron H*bb*rd. It's not about the appeal of The Future; it's all about the appeal of The Shockingly New.

In the hands of lesser fabricators, of course, the appeal to the new becomes the hodge and the podge, nonsense of ninjas in schoolboy outfits. But that's the future.

Two fine pieces of dancing and a music video

Piece the first:

Earlier this year, Charles Sperling (who is not on LJ though he damn well should be) took me to the Spring Film Forum Members' Brunch; the main show we saw was Buster Keaton's Steamboat Bill, Junior with a live piano accompanist. It was breath-taking--somehow Keaton and his cohorts can wring laughter out of two people simply looking past each other.

But Steamboat Bill Jr. is not a long film, so the Film Forum padded the show out with some short features, a trivia competition, and special surprise guests, including Marge Champion, who was the rotoscope model for both Snow White and Dopey in the Disney feature film (they showed parts of her film work--eloquent and charming). But of the short features, the high point was an excerpt from the 1942 film Stormy Weather. There's a five-minute nightclub sequence which begins with Cab Calloway and his orchestra performing "Jumpin' Jive" that segues into a tap-dance routine by The Nicholas Brothers. Fred Astaire once said that was the finest piece of tap dancing ever filmed, and you can go watch it on Google Video right now.

Piece the second:

Digging through the links in the comments to the aforementioned Making Light thread on That Song, I found a recommendation by Lucy Huntzinger:

You must watch this video: go to http://www.okgo.net/news.aspx . . . . This is the greatest thing I have seen all year.

It is, indeed, terrific--a simple idea, brilliantly executed. Follow the links to the "Here It Goes Again" video and download in the format of your choice.

Piece the third:

sarah_ovenall mentioned that she has never seen The Lawrence Welk Show. Here's my favorite moment from it; sorry that the video is so blurry.

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Yonkers Wildlife Sanctuary

No, not our basement.

We live about 1/10th of a mile from a four-lane highway (the Cross-County Parkway). There's an exit ramp off the highway that we take whenever we come home from parts east; in this particular case, nellorat and I had gone grocery shopping at the nearby Cross County Mall.

(You can see the exit ramp on this Google Map; our house is on Valentine Street by the baseball field in center right; the exit ramp is at center left.)

The exit is noteworthy because the meadow it encloses is the home of a family of groundhogs, and whenever I drive through the exit, I slow down to look for them. I like groundhogs--they're sort of a cross between rats and wombats. So I slowed down, looking for groundhogs and didn't see any.

Instead, I saw a red fox, just sittin' there looking back at me. I cried out "Fox!" but she didn't see it. Then I saw another one, just sittin' about 20 feet north of the first one, and this time nellorat saw it too.

I am fairly certain that I have never seen a red fox in the wild before. It was marvelous.

Oh, and we have three new baby rats. Baaay-bies! Photos soon, I promise.