The Best Movie Monster, Reader Nomination!

Way back when, I posted The Best Movie Monster -- nominating Gamera, for reasons set out in that post (don't bother looking for the post on here; it's been collected up in my book Do Pizza Samples Really Exist?, which you can get here).

That nomination was quickly challenged by another, and then, most recently, by another one: Anonymous recently said this:

Godzilla, hail to the King baby.

I don't know if that's the same Anonymous as originally nominated Godzilla, too. What I do know is that the punctuation on that phrase is curiously devoid of emotion. I'd have used an exclamation point on the end of it. But I guess that's just how I roll -- with my emotions on my sleeve... I and all the other people who love Gamera, the true Best Movie Monster!

Do you like stuff? Do you think it's The Best? You can nominate your own Best by commenting here, or emailing me at thetroublewithroy[at]yahoo.com.

If you choose the email route, make sure you put "Best of Everything" or something like it in the comment line, or I might think it's spam and sic a fire-breathing giant spinning turtle on you.

And remember, comments get you entered in the bimonthly drawing to win a free book.

I think it was Sally. It may have been Linus.

Maybe your eyes are strained from reading posts on The Best Of Everything. Maybe you were born (like me and Sally Brown) with amblyopeia. Maybe you're just nearsighted. Or farsighted. Or have astigmatism, like Granny on the Bugs Bunny cartoon. Whatever the reason, if you need eyeglasses, you know that they're not a fashion accessory: They're a necessity.

But the necessary aspect of glasses hasn't kept them from being overpriced: Stores sell frames for hundreds of dollars, jacking up the cost to you so that if you need glasses to see you'll pay through the nose for the privilege of knowing what's going on around you.

Zenni Optical thinks that's wrong, and is doing something about it. As set out in a recent article on Examiner.com (read the whole thing at http://www.examiner.com/x-28795-Brooklyn-Liberal-Examiner~y2009m11d13-Cheap-eyeglasses-are-a-reality-Check-out-Erics-review-of-Zenni-Optical), Zenni Optical is transforming the eyeglasses business with a remarkable solution: glasses for as low as $8.

Not just any old ugly glasses, either: these are stylish frames and progressive lenses, tinted lenses, sunglasses, you name it, with prices starting at $8, instead of at the hundreds of dollars you'll pay at the strip mall store.

Zenni does this by making their own glasses: they have their own designers and factories and they cut out the middleman there, and through selling only online: no overhead for fancy stores. Their advertising budget is almost nothing, too, so they've got low costs and pass the savings on to you in the form of $8 glasses.

It's possible, through Zenni, to get glasses -- a medical necessity -- for a reasonable price, and people are starting to catch on to that.

The Best Way To Prove "Scientists" Are Making It Up

Which do you think is more "scientific:" hobbits, or dark matter?

That's a fair question, and a timely one, as both fictional creations were in the news this week, and both help demonstrate that scientists haven't advance one whit from the dark ages -- the time when "science" first felt that it could describe the natural world through the process of "just making things up."

Human history is full of "scientists" just making stuff up to explain natural phenomena, and human history is full of people buying into it because, you know, it sounds about right. "It sounds about right" is, by now, an unwritten but paradigmatic law of "science" -- and, so far as I can tell, it's about the only law that any "scientists" follow.

Maybe "scientists" follow The Law Of Sounding About Right because it's been around so long: One of the earliest examples of that "scientific" law is retrograde motion. "Retrograde motion" was the explanation early "scientists" used to explain the movements of the planets. Those early "scientists" noticed that the stars rarely moved, while the planets moved all over the place, relatively speaking. Those early "scientists" also noticed that the planets did not appear to move in normal, forward motion -- something they were at a loss to explain, because early "scientists" believed that the Earth was the center of the universe, and that the planets and stars orbited the earth.

If that was the case, then, the planets should move in a straight, or at least constant, direction around the earth. But they didn't move the way theories predicted they should: The "scientists" had a theory about the Earth's position vis a vis the rest of the Universe, and then they tested that theory by observing the universe, and noticed that their observations didn't match the theory.

But did they scrap the theory? Heck no: That's not the "scientific" way, because that would violate The Law Of Sounding About Right. Instead of scrapping the Earth-Centric Theory, "scientists" came up with retrograde motion, which is, in a nutshell, the belief that the planets sometimes backed up a little.


The movement that a planet makes in the sky -- the apparent motion of the planet -- is dependent not just on that planet's motion, but on the observer's motion. So as the Earth moves, and as Mars moves, it creates the appearance that Mars has moved forward and backward in the sky.

The appearance -- because that's not really happening. That appearance posed problems for early "scientists" who were unwilling to abandon their theory about Earth's place, so the scientists simply said: Well, Mars, and the other planets, must back up from time to time. They go this way for a while, and then that way for a while, and then head forward again.

This new theory, The Indecisive Planet Theory, worked great for "scientists" because it explained the entire universe in a way they were comfortable with.

That's an important qualifier: in a way they were comfortable with. Because The Indecisive Planet Theory, from a truly scientific standpoint, did not work great... or at all, as it didn't explain the actual universe. It explained the universe the way "scientists" wanted it to be.

(You'll note, throughout this post, that when I talk of science, I'll phrase it one of two ways: there's science, without quotes, which signifies actual scientific thought, demonstrating a logical and non-magical application of observations to theories, and then there's "science" with quotes, which is what every single "scientist" these days practices -- and "science" is not much different than "creative writing," only there is a lesser emphasis on gerunds in science.)

So again, from a "scientific" standpoint, The Indecisive Planet Theory worked great, because it meant that "scientists" had explained things the way they wanted them to be, and could go back to doing whatever it is "scientists" do all day long. Read magazines, or something. Play Gnip Gnop.

Ultimately, as we know, "scientists" were forced to abandon The Indecisive Planet Theory, as well as The Earth-Centric Theory, leaving "science" as a whole free to go on to start making up other things, like cool dinosaurs and cool stories about dinosaurs.

I'm not saying all dinosaurs are made-up -- I'm pretty sure that at some point, there were dinosaurs, and I'm pretty sure that Adam and Eve rode those dinosaurs out of the Garden of Eden. (I may be confusing Sunday School and "Real" School a bit, but, as "science" teaches us, facts are entirely unimportant.)


But some dinosaurs have been made up, and some facts about dinosaurs have been made up -- because "scientists" decided, at some point, that it wasn't cool or interesting enough to have giant flesh-eating lizards fighting it out on sun-scrubbed plains. No, dinosaurs had to be more gianter, and more flesh-eating-er, and more smarter and do all kinds of cool things that stopped just shy of building rocket ships to flee the asteroid that "scientists" believe wiped them out.

(In fact, has there ever been any proof that dinosaurs didn't build rocket ships to escape the planet? Rockets that left the Earth wouldn't leave a fossil record behind... and the fossil record is, tellingly, completely devoid of evidence of rockets. That seems to me to be "scientific" proof that dinosaurs were able to build rockets and escape the earth.)

(It was probably all those dinosaurs stomping around on Mars and Venus that made the planets back up from time to time.)

(That, my readers, is the beginning of what someday will be recognized as the true Theory of Everything.)

"Scientists" began making up dinosaurs with the brontosaurus -- a dinosaur created by "scientists" in their quest for fame and glory around the turn of the century. The discoverer of the "brontosaurus," a "scientist" named O.C. Marsh, found a bunch of bones, but couldn't find a head. So he used a head from a find four (or 400) miles away, and just tacked it on, calling the resulting creation a brontosaurus.

(O.C. March, whose real names was Othniel, made up brontosaurus in part to outdo his rival, Edward Drinker Cope. In the 1800s, it apparently was in vogue to name your kid after socially-acceptable habits... at least judging from Cope and his other contemporary, Nathaniel OpiumHookahSmoker Johnston.)

The fakery (excuse me, ... "science") was discovered almost immediately, but that didn't stop "science" from going on claiming the brontosaurus existed... for nearly a century. In fact, when the U.S. Postal Service issued a set of dinosaur stamps that included the brontosaurus, not only did "scientists" not stop them from promoting a dinosaur that "science" had simply made up, but "scientists" in fact defended the Post Office. Stephen "Jay" Gould minimized the controversy -- a "scientist" saying it's no big deal that "science" made something up -- and Robert Bakker, who is described as a "celebrated" "paleontologist" apparently to this day continues to use the name brontosaurus to describe things that are not, technically speaking, brontosauri.

"Scientists" didn't stop with making up dinosaurs -- as they did with not only brontosaurus, the but also the velociraptor, a "dinosaur" that never existed until Michael Crichton dreamed them up for his book Jurassic Park, but which thereafter scientists pretended did exist. (I won't get into that debate again. The first time I proved that velociraptors never existed, in the essay Velociraptors, My Butt, is available in this book, and the second time is posted here.) No, "scientists" also made up how dinosaurs acted, based on a complete misunderstanding of how things work in the natural world. (I.e., "science.")

"Scientists" have long presented theories of dinosaur behavior based on fossil records of how animals' bones were found embedded in rock. They will find, say, a pterodactyl skeleton lying across an apatosaurus' skeleton, and they will conclude that the pterodactyl must have tried to eat the apatosaurus, and they will then publish "scientific" papers entitled Omnivorous Habits Of The Pteranodon In The Late Jurassic Period, in which they will "conclude" that pterodactyls, previously believed to be only poor flyers with little leg strength, must in fact have been mighty soaring dinosaurs able to use their grasping claws to first strangle, then carry back, an entire apatosaurus to feed their young. And they will become famous for that.

That conclusion I just wrote, specious as it is, will (a) be published in a major "scientific" journal within a year, and (b) rests on the assumption that a pterodactyl dove down on an apatosaurus -- and then both were suddenly killed, right on the spot, and not moved at all by any natural force until enough sediment had covered them up and then fossilize the bones in the exact manner they originally fell in.


Do this: Take a chicken bone, and a pork spare rib. Drive out to South Dakota, and when nobody's looking, drop them on the ground, one across the other. Then come back in a year and see if they've been moved at all. If they have, that tells you how likely it is that the Pterodactyl-Apatosaurus Battle occurred. (If they haven't, leave them there, and one day "scientists" will tell future generations of the mighty Chick-Hen which battled the Pork Monster into submission in the deserts of South Dakota.)

Isn't it more likely that the bones ended up there either by accident, or because other forces (scavengers, wind, water) moved them there, resulting in a coincidental array of bones?

Don't ask "scientists" that, because coincidence doesn't get tenure.

Dinosaurs aren't the only place that "science" makes things up, and popular "scientists" like Stephen "Jay" Gould are not the only ones who fall into that trap. Even Einstein did it -- creating the cosmological constant.

The "cosmological constant" was a number Einstein invented for one purpose: To make his theories work. Unlike, say, pi, the cosmological constant had no place in the real world or in science. Its sole purpose in life, as it were, was to make the universe be what Einstein wanted it to be.

Einstein wanted the universe to be static -- not expanding, not contracting, but always the same, in a state of equilibrium. Einstein believed the universe was static, and then he came up with his theory of relativity... which, unfortunately for him, did not work with a static universe.

Einstein discovered -- in the scientific equivalent of duct-taping a car bumper back on -- that if he plugged in a certain number, then general relativity would work, and the universe would be static.

It's important to note that this number was entirely made up. It was used to balance the equation. In a simplified explanation, imagine that you are going over your budget. You see that you make $500 per month, and that you have expenses of $100 on food, $50 on gas, $400 on rent, and $50 on entertainment. That doesn't balance out, as you add it up: you've got $600 on one side and $500 on the other, so your savings will contract.

But, if you simply add $100 to the other side, then your equation balances perfectly.

You wouldn't do that in a budget, of course, because "making up a number" doesn't actually do anything (unless you're in Washington D.C., in which case "making up a number" is called a "budget projection" and it lets you claim that one side or the other is wrong) to help you.

But in "science," things are different -- making up a number in "science" is generally as accepted as making up dinosaurs, or anything else: It's considered good, solid "science."

I'm not being facetious -- Einstein, whose name is synonymous with both "genius" and "science" -- made up a number so that the universe would match his equation, instead of making an equation that matched his universe. Einstein later realized he was wrong, and called his "cosmological constant" the "biggest blunder" of his life.

Einstein's realization that there was no cosmological constant, and calling it a blunder would, you'd think, cause other "scientists" to stop talking about the cosmological constant and get back to, you know, science, instead of "science," but if you thought that, then you've already forgotten the example of the brontosaurus: Of course "scientists" didn't abandon the cosmological constant -- they still use it:

Scientists at UCLA refer to the "cosmological constant" as something that "still exists as a possibility." To examine the "scientific" rigor that UCLA applies to studying the possible cosmological constant, consider this sentence:

"In larger systems we cannot make part per million verifications of the standard model."

That means, to you and me, that UCLA's "scientists" cannot verify their equations outside of the solar system. Does that stop them from equating? It does not:

In the case of the Sun's orbit around the Milky Way, we only say that the vacuum energy density is less than half of the average matter density in a sphere centered at the Galactic Center that extends out to the Sun's distance from the center. If the vacuum energy density were more than this, there would be no centripetal acceleration of the Sun toward the Galactic Center. But we compute the average matter density assuming that the vacuum energy density is zero, so to be conservative I will drop the "half" and just say

rho(vacuum) < (3/(4*pi*G))(v/R)2 = 3*10-24 gm/cc
for a circular velocity v = 220 km/sec and a distance R = 8.5 kpc.

Did you get that? UCLA "scientists" have equations that don't work outside the solar system, so they assume things to be true, and then make adjustments to their equations to be conservative.

That's fine, being conservative, if you're trying to estimate, say, how much cash you'll need to stop at McDonald's and pick up some Happy Meals. "I'm not sure how much they cost, so I'll be conservative and assume $5 each..." because if you're wrong about the price of Happy Meals, spaceships don't accelerate improperly and crash... but if you're not practicing actual science and you try to land a radio-controlled car on Mars, you're going to botch it.

Which brings me to hobbits and dark matter. "Hobbits," as you may have heard if you read the paper this weekend, have now been "scientifically" verified to have existed, in a "scientific" discovery that just goes to show that "science" is now freely plundering from the world of literature. I expect that by April, we'll be reading headlines announcing that there really were zombies in Victorian England.

Back in 2004, "scientists" announced the discovery of "hobbits," human pygmy ancestors who grew no larger than a 3-year-old child. The timing of that discovery was just months after the release of the third installment of The Lord Of The Rings trilogy, something that would have been coincidental except, remember, coincidence doesn't get tenure. So "scientists" who discovered some tiny human bones, in early 2004, couldn't have discovered tiny human bones, but had to have discovered hobbits.

When just discovering hobbits wasn't enough, this past week, "scientists" had to announce that not only were there really hobbits, but that the hobbits disproved the Theory of Evolution! Remarking on the find of a tiny skeleton, a skeleton that would have no significance whatsoever absent a fantastic hypothesis, one "scientist" suggested that previous theories of evolution occuring in Africa and then spreading over the continents were wrong -- and that instead, pre-evolved hominids might have left Africa, evolved like crazy all over the place... and then walked back to Africa to lay a new fossil record!

You might find that unlikely, but have you considered the fact that there's absolutely no evidence to support that theory? Said the "scientist:"

"We'd have to say something got out earlier than that and we don't have any record of its evolution in the whole of Asia.... That means there is a complete missing chapter of the story of human evolution in Asia if that is correct. That would be very interesting and important if true."

Note that it's not clear what the precedent is for the word That in the last sentence. It would be interesting and important if what is "true?" The "scientist" doesn't say -- but he does rely on the complete absence of proof to prove his "theories."

(Do you see why I'm so convinced, now, that the New Theory of Everything is correct, and spaceship-building dinosaurs are living on the moons of Jupiter? Like the HobbitVolution, we have no record of it, anywhere... so it must be true.)

A complete lack of proof is now the new standard for proving something exists, in fact -- judging by the latest proof that "dark matter" exists.

"Dark matter," if you don't know, is what the Universe is mostly made of, according to "scientists." It's matter that cannot be seen, touched, felt, smelled, heard, or sensed in any way, but it's there. We know it's there because... it has to be there, or our equations don't work.

(If you just said cosmological constant!, then pat yourself on the head, then get back to digging a bunker to hide out in when the Spaceship Dinosaurs return.)

Dark matter is a creation of "scientists" who have theories about how our universe works -- theories that don't... um... actually describe how our universe works. These "scientists" came up with the theories, then matched them to the observations they made ("observations" being science-y language for "looking at how the world works"), and noted that the equations didn't actually describe the universe they observed.

Instead of making up new equations -- that's hard! -- the "scientists" made up a universe they wanted to exist, a universe made up of dark matter, that stuff that we can't see, hear, taste, or feel, etc. etc. By filling our universe with dark matter, the "scientists" made their equations work, and the solution was perfect because who could criticize it? The dark matter was out there, somewhere, untouchable, unknowable, but balancing those equations like mad -- so everyone was happy and nobody had to do any real work or think or anything like that.

Plus, dark matter followed the only "scientific" principle we have, The Law Of Sounding About Right: It sounded right -- after all, space is mostly dark, isn't it? When I look up at the sky, at night, it's pretty dark, so there must be a lot of dark matter up there.

But, as with the hobbits, "scientists" couldn't leave well enough alone -- "well enough" being a corollary of The Law Of Sounding About Right: if things work but we can't explain why, don't rock the boat.

"Scientists" rocked the boat. They weren't content with dark matter -- about which, a "scientist" had this to say:

"We don't know what dark matter is."

(That's a direct quote from Rolf-Dieter Heuer, whose ignorance should concern you because he's the Director-General of the European Organization for Nuclear Research.)

Not content with dark matter, "scientists" went on to invent "dark energy," which together with dark matter they say makes up 95% of the universe (the other 5% being "Happy Meals," I think. Or velociraptors.)

NASA -- whose mission these days appears to be to crash-land stuff onto other stuff-- has this to say about dark energy: "It is a complete mystery." That doesn't stop NASA from declaring that the universe is 70% dark energy -- a "scientific" thought process that explains why they keep crashing stuff into other stuff.

Even then, "scientists" wouldn't quit pushing the ridiculousness of dark matter and dark energy, leading to this week's Big Important Announcement which, not coincidentally, is not only Big and Important but which also is The Best Way To Prove "Scientists" Are (Still) Just Making It All Up.

The Big and Important Announcment is this: "Scientists" now say they will prove dark matter exists.

(Which, sharp thinkers will note, they already had supposedly proved -- don't their equations prove that?)

"Scientists" will prove that dark matter exists by crashing things into other things, in this case using the CERN particle accelerator to smash tiny hypothetical things into other tiny hypothetical things to create even tinier hypothetical things, in a quest to find the Higgs Boson.

The Higgs Boson is an interesting thought experiment: It is, in theory, a particle that, upon coming into existence, created and gave mass to everything in the universe -- including, weirdly, itself. That is, the Higgs Boson created the entire universe, including the Higgs Boson.

That's a neat trick -- one that earned the Higgs Boson the appellation "God Particle." ("Scientists" prefer that you call it the "the champagne bottle boson," although that article also suggests that the Higgs Boson doesn't exist.) The Higgs Boson is also a trick that can be performed only in thought, since in reality something can't create itself, as you and I (but not "scientists") know and understand.

The Higgs Boson was named after its creator, Peter Higgs, who came up with the idea in 1964. The particle was necessary because theories about the Standard Model -- a description of the universe didn't work:

"The Standard Model would predict that the probability of two particles having very high energies colliding with one another would be greater than one, a physical impossibility!) To fix this problem, there must be additional particles. The simplest models that explain the masses of the W and Z have only one such particle: the Higgs boson."

The Higgs Boson isn't the only particle that theoretically could fix the equations-- it's just the one that "scientists" like best, in part because, again, there's no proof that it ever existed.

Says Heur-- him again-- about the Higgs Boson: "We know everything about this particle. The only thing we don't know is if it exists."

But he's not dismayed at the possibility that the foundation of most physics today might not exist: "...if it does not exist, we are bound to find something that is very much like it."

He said, without a hint of irony... or proof.

The CERN particle accelerator -- so large that it actually is twice the size of the universe -- (prove me wrong!) is going to, in part, try to prove that the Higgs Boson exists. But that alone isn't enough for Heur and the CERN people -- they had to lump in dark matter, as well, and announce this week that the CERN experiments could prove dark matter exists: "Our Large Hadron Collider (LHC) could be the first machine to give us insight into the dark universe" Heur said in talking to the press this week.

And that's it: the final straw on real science's back: It's treated as news that, in searching for the existence of a thought experiment, a machine could prove the existence of something else.

Could.

Heur doesn't say how "dark matter" could be proven to exist -- just that it could. Heur doesn't explain the mechanism that would show that dark matter -- the latest brontosaurus to come out of "science" -- actually exists. He just says it could, and the press, and "scientific" sources, report that as news, and as a conclusion, and as a fact. Heur called a news conference to say that a hypothesis could, hypothetically, be proven, sometime in the future, maybe...

... and that was treated as science.

The Higgs Boson's presumptive ability to prove the existence of dark matter through some unknown hypothetical mechanism is, in the end, The Best Way To Prove "Scientists" Are (Still) Just Making It All Up.

Well, rational thought, you had a good run. Logic, you gave it a shot. Scientific method, you left it all out there on the field. But I'm sorry, boys: your time is done. We have no call for you anymore; we've got things to crash into other things, and press conferences to hold, and hypotheses to invent, and retrogrades to motion, and we can't be bothered with logic and proof and facts, because there's very little time to get this all done.

After all, those dinosaurs may come back any day now.

How can I search for what you said about me on Facebook?

This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of LeapFish Inc. All opinions are 100% mine.

I, today, when I saw that video, stopped and thought for a moment just how much the Web had changed since I really began using it.

Back in 2000, when I first got Internet access, I occasionally looked up things like hotels or legal research. I didn't think much of the Internet and didn't use it.

Just 10 years later, I use the internet to track my continuing legal education, for legal research, for blogging, for publishing -- and more. I post videos and links to songs and I watch movies and TV shows, and for a while there I was (briefly) on Facebook -- and I don't even make full use of the Web, not the way some people do.

People who are more web-involved than me have talks on Facebook and other social networking sites, or they use Smashwords and other self-publishing sites, or they Twitter, or they have video responses to other videos -- all of which helps keep a running stream of information constantly being generated.

And that video made me think this: When I search, I don't find anything on Facebook, or Twitter or Hulu-- I find stuff on old, static websites and blogs, like this one, or MSN.

That's not where the information is, and not where the content is. I could try to find out information about a company I'm considering suing, for example, and I'll get their website, and maybe the Better Business Bureau, or some such -- but what I won't get is whether there are people talking about them on Myspace or Scribd, or whether news reports with videos posted to the web have mentioned them.

Some companies, like leapfish, are starting to provide relevant and high-speed search -- but it's only beginning, just like the new Web is only beginning. That's exciting -- and that's what I need: a search engine that can come up with results from what people share online, on their home pages and in their videos:

The concept is Real-Time Search: searching that when fully realized will let you find out what's being talked about NOW on any topic you want to look into. Interested in the NCAA Tournament? Find out how many people are betting on which teams... instantly.

It's coming, and that's great -- the more people post stuff, the more information there is and the more need there is to sort that information in a meaningful way, one that lets us find out what we really want to know and keep up with the "real time" web, the one where you and I and the 300 million other people online are the creators -- and the readers.

WHODATHUNKIT?!: The 3 Best Things You Want To Know About the 82ND Annual Academy Awards.

It's time to once again fulfill the terms of my probation and do some public good, in the form of Whodathunkit?!, the only blog post anywhere in any universe written by anyone which focuses not on the same-old-same-old stories that everyone else tells you about a major event, but on the things you really want to know about a major event. Let other blogs talk about fashion, and make fun of James Cameron's hair, and speculate on how many times Jack Nicholson will be shown on camera despite the fact that he hasn't made a movie in 32 years, and despite the fact that he's essentially played the exact same role in everything since he did The Shining.

Others can talk of such mundanities. I won't mention those things at all, other than to mention that I'm not going to mention them, which really doesn't count as "mentioning" them, at least not in my book. (My book being "The Great Big Book Of Things That Don't Count.")

Instead, I focus on the stuff you really want to know about the major events in our lives, major events like the 82nd annual Academy Awards, conventionally called "The Oscars," or, called that at least until we get around to shortening that name because today's modern society doesn't have time to stand around saying things like The Oscars, or Headline News: we need to condense those lengthy, time-consuming, productivity-destroying titles into tidy little acronyms like HLN. In fact, just typing the words "The Oscars" has taken up so much time that now I'm annoyed and behind schedule for the rest of this post, so someone in society should get around to shortening that name a little in order to get me, and society, back on track.

I suggest calling them "O's." Not The O's or anything -- that's still to long. Just O's. Unless, of course, Oprah has copyrighted that letter. In world where McDonald's can copyright the word Smiles, anything is possible.

If Oprah has copyrighted the letter O, then scrap my plans to call The Oscars simply "O's" and instead, let's focus on what we're all going to do when Oprah quits messing around and declares herself queen of the world. (I have dibs on move to Mars, which I'll do because I can't stand it when Oprah, each year, announces that she's going to lose weight and then is shown on TV all over the place cooing over a Sweet Potato.)



I might just move to Mars now. Let's see Oprah be queen of a planet that has no breathable air and is littered with our no-longer-functioning probes that really are nothing more than radio-controlled cars we've blasted into space!

This time, Whodathunkit?! begins with a question that may or may not have an answer, as the three things in any Whodathunkit!? are always things I think up off the top of my head -- I have no time to plan these posts or outline them; I've barely got time to type the words The Oscars in this go-go world of ours where for some reason my cell phone has to be connected to the Internet even though I only use my cell phone at times when it would be inconvenient to have a laptop with me, like when I'm driving, or when I'm cooking dinner, so why would I use the Internet?

Although, now that I think of it, I really would like the ability to read Wondermark while I'm sitting at a stoplight. If I could squeeze that in, I might have more time to do things like type out the words The Oscars. I'll have to give this some thought.

In the meantime, here's your 82nd Annual Oscars Whodathunkit?!:

1. Has there ever been a movie which was set at the Academy Awards, and which itself won an academy award? That's the question that popped into my head as I sat down to write this. Because if there's one thing that Hollywood loves more than movies like The Blind Side (which sends the perfect Hollywood message, the perfect Hollywood message being "Black people can do really well as long as there's a well-meaning white woman showing them how") it's movies about Hollywood itself. Virtually any reference to Hollywood will win over the people in Hollywood and have them raving over how great the show or movie is, even if the show or movie is really not very good at all and even if, in fact, nobody watches that show or movie other than people in Hollywood.

(See, e.g., Shrek 2 and Thirty Rock.)

So I wondered: Have there ever been any movies which themselves were set at the Academy Awards? And then I wondered If there were, wouldn't that be a lock to win an Academy Award? And then I wondered If that happened, would that bring on "the singularity," which is the moment when people will stop having a separate existence from their computers and instead will merge with them to become a sort of collective, always-living consciousness, evolving to a higher state of existence?

That "singularity," by the way, is a real thing, in the sense that real people believe that it might really happen. You can even read about it on the website devoted to selling you books about the "Singularity." But you don't need to read about it, because I've told you everything you need to know about the Singularity, which is that if you believe it, then someday we'll all become computerized cyber people existing only as bits and bytes and maybe photons (those are a thing, I think) and other ephemera instead of these clunky bodies we drag around and feed sweet potatoes to nowadays.

And you don't need to read about the Singularity because it can't happen, and here's why: Who's going to take care of the computers? Have you ever seen a computer that can make it through even a day without somehow crashing? So once we build this matrix and upload our consciousness into it, who will be responsible for keeping the hard drives running?

I'm not going to stay behind and do it. That's for sure.

Unfortunately for my burning question, searching for movies in which the plot involved the Academy Awards is very difficult -- you're likely to end up on a site in which The New York Times urges teachers to incorporate the Oscars into classroom lectures, which will then lead you to further despair about the state of our society, which will then cause you to remember that many people today eat organic foods, and that organic foods are, in a nutshell, generally deadly poisonous, so maybe there's hope for the future after all, "hope for the future" meaning "the kind of people who think that the Oscars are appropriate class room material are unlikely to end up running the world or having any lasting significance [fingers crossed]".)

Instead of just relying on what someone else posted on the Internet -- and, remember, according to the Singularity, someday we'll all be posted on the Internet, and presumably linking up will be the hot new sexy trend, with people warning that when you link someone else you link every person they've ever linked -- I had to do some thinking and reading, namely, reading a list of all 81 Best Picture winners and thinking about whether they sounded as though they were set at the Academy Awards.

And the answer is... can you believe that "Amadeus" won Best Picture? The 80s were a strange and wonderful time when craze after craze swept America: upturned collars, Australia, you name it, but no craze was more weird or greater than the brief Mozart Mania we as American went through, a craze perfectly summed up in this knockoff mash-up video:



Based on that, though, I'd say someone should get on the ball and begin writing a movie about the Academy Awards, and, for good measure, work in something about the Singularity. That's pretty hot right now, too.

2. Whatever You Do, Don't Challenge the Supremacy of the Thundercats gelflings Na'Vi. The Academy allows filmmakers to campaign for their films, as you may or may not know. (You know that if you are an Academy member, a filmmaker, or the kind of geek who reads Variety even though you're not involved in show business in any way.)(I'm none of those things. I just know about the campaigning because I know lots of things, things I know as a result of spending all my time googling weird questions that pop into my head instead of, you know, working.)

You can campaign, it seems, by billboard:



I know, that was not a billboard campaigning for Best Picture. But it is a great billboard, isn't it? I imagine the accident rate on that highway went up exponentially when that ad was first displayed.

Or you can campaign by sending DVDs to the voters in the Academy -- because, I'm sure, the members of the Academy otherwise wouldn't get around to watching your movie, right?

Or you could send out four-color brochures, as The Color Purple and Out Of Africa did back in 1986 -- getting criticized and also getting 22 nominations between them.

What you can't do is email anyone, and you especially can't email people a comment that may be deemed to be derogatory of Avatar a/k/a "The Greatest Motion Picture Ever Made And F-You If You Disagree Because It Made a Zillion Dollars In The Time It Took Me To Type This."

Apparently, the Academy has a rule-- apparently, the Academy has rules (!)(?)(;)(?) -- that says that a campaign cannot promote one film by disparaging another. And that rule has resulted in one of the producers of The Hurt Locker being barred from attending the award show because, according to the Academy, the producer's email violated the rule against disparaging other films.

Or, so they say. Because you can look up the rules -- they're available online, as everything and everyone will one day be -- and the rules don't seem to say anything about how you can promote your film or whether you can disparage another film.

So whence came this rule, that an ad for one film shall not disparage another? Doesn't every ad promoting a film as the best disparage another film as not the best? There can only be one best, as this blog repeatedly reminds people, and if your film is the best, then other films are by definition not the best, and are inferior to your film.

So is there a rule? Or did the Hurt Locker producer get Na'vied -- a verb I just made up to cover a situation in which a person uses an unfair advantage they have to kick someone else out of their spot?

And also, why bother emailing when you can have billboards, like this?



3. You can't sell an Oscar. One thing I did find out from reading those rules is that nobody can sell an Oscar. The rules provide that:

Every award shall be conditioned upon the execution and delivery to the Academy by the recipient thereof of a receipt and agreement reading as follows:


Gentlemen: [NOTE: That's SEXIST! But it's also the way the official agreement is worded.]

I hereby acknowledge receipt of Academy Regulations for use of the Academy Award® [NOTE: YES, THAT "R" IS IN THE ORIGINAL AGREEMENT.] statuette and the phrase “Academy Award(s)” in advertising. In consideration of the signing of a similar agreement by other Academy Award nominees, I agree to comply with said regulations.

I understand that on (date) I may receive from you a replica of your copyrighted statuette,
commonly known as the “Oscar®,” as an award for (category) – (film title). I acknowledge that my receipt of said replica does not entitle me to any right whatever in your copyright, trade-mark and service-mark of said statuette and that only the physical replica itself shall belong to me.

In consideration of your delivering said replica to me, I agree to comply with your rules and regulations respecting its use and not to sell or otherwise dispose of it or any other “Oscar” replica I have been awarded or have received, nor permit it or any other “Oscar” replica I have been awarded or have received to be sold or disposed of by operation of law, without first offering to sell it to you for the sum of $1.00. You shall have thirty days after any such offer is made to you within which to accept it. This agreement shall be binding not only on me, but also on my heirs, legatees, executors, administrators, estate, successors and assigns. My legatees and heirs shall have the right to acquire any “Oscar” statuette replica I have received, if it becomes part of my estate, subject to this agreement.

I agree that if I have heretofore received any Academy trophy I shall be bound by this receipt and agreement with the same force and effect as though I had executed and delivered the same in consideration of receiving such trophy.

______________________________________
(Signature of Recipient)


So, to be more accurate -- you can only sell an Oscar® if you first give the Academy a chance to buy back the statue for a buck and they don't take you up on that. But you can leave it to your kids -- who then can't sell it, either.

But if you can't sell an Oscar without first offering it to the Academy, then how can you explain this piece in The New York Times from a few years ago? The answer is that before 1950, the Academy didn't bother to have people agree to this at all; since 1950, the Academy first began asking, then requiring, that recipients agree not to sell the statuette.

The Academy is reported, in that piece, to aggressively try to stop people from selling Oscars even when they have the legal right to do so -- and some of the actors and directors help by buying up the Oscars and returning them to the Academy. (Steven Spielberg apparently has kicked in $1.5 million -- or 0.0000000001% of his income -- to help with this.)

Why would you want to sell an Oscar? Maybe to make some money off the memorabilia if it's left to you by the stars -- as one assistant did. Or maybe to just take a cruise: Harold Russell, the only Oscar winner ever to sell his own statue, reportedly did so in order to finance a cruise his second wife wanted to take. He netted $50,000 for his award back in 1992.


Read Last Year's Oscar Whodathunkit?! here.

Read all The Bests... related to movies here.

Here's an alphabetical listing of every single thing I've ever discussed on this blog. Neato!

Guest Post: The Ten Best Jobs For Men in Romance Novels.

Saying "Erin O'Riordan writes erotic romance" is like saying "the sun emits some energy." Rare indeed is the author who has both a fantastic output and fantastic skill -- and Erin O'Riordan, erotic romance writer extraordinaire is that. Because Sweetie loves her romance novels, and because I like blogging, I combined the two and asked Erin to write a guest post. Here's what she gave me (I did the pictures... don't blame her.)

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Apparently, the subject of attractive men comes up quite frequently on this blog. [Note: That's Sweetie's Input. I'm responsible for aliens and leftover pizza.] Naturally, it comes up in my line of work, writing erotic romance novels, too. With that in mind, I bring you

The Ten Best Jobs For Men in Romance Novels.

Here they are, in no particular order:



10. Cowboy. I think Emilio Estevez in Young Guns ruined me for life. For me (a woman), very little could be more sensual than the thought of a roll in the tumbleweeds with a dusty cowhand. But it’s not just that: for my sensibilities, anyway, there’s a certain drama, a romance even, to imagining the cowboys together. Brokeback Mountain was just the beginning. The eleven tales in How the West Was Done (edited by Adam Carpenter, Ravenous Romance, 2009) portray a range of cowboy fantasies, from rough-and-tumble stories from the dusty trails of the 19th century to contemporary romance at the rodeo. What they all have in common is hot, steamy sex between two buff, beautiful men, at least one of whom is always of the bronc-riding variety.


9. Stay-at-home dad. A young dad who’s lost his baby-mama through no fault of his own is sexy precisely because he’s responsible, gentle, and loving. If a romantic heroine is lucky, that DILF is ready to love again, and has room in his heart for a new baby-mama. As a bonus, she gets to experience the joys of parenthood without the morning sickness and hospital bills.


8. Fire fighter. What’s not to love? He’s smoking hot, brave, strong, and he can throw you over his shoulder and carry you.







7. Nurse/Doctor. We romantic types love a man in uniform, and it’s sexy when the uniform happens to be scrubs or a white lab coat. Witness only the wavy-haired, Victorian hero of “Hysteria” by Rushmore Judd.


6. Soldier. Case in point #1: On Leave by Lois Bonde. As we meet Lea Martin, she's in the most heart-grabbing situation: saying goodbye to her older brother Ward as he goes off to war in the Middle East. She expects she'll miss Ward and worry about him every day. She doesn't expect the goodbye kiss she gets from Ward's best friend and fellow soldier, Mike Holt. Lea had never thought of Mike in that light before. His kiss is so unbelievably sensual, Lea makes Mike promise to come back to her. Ten months of pent-up fantasies later, Mike comes home on leave, and paying Lea a visit is high on his to-do list. Will he be the man she's been imagining while he's been gone? Could things between them ever be as good as that first kiss? In On Leave (Erotique Press, 2006, $3), Lois Bonde answers these questions with a moving (and totally hot) portrait of a friendship becoming much more.

Case in point #2: Marcus in “Homecoming.”


5. Vampire. Okay, vampire isn’t a job, per se. The Count Dracula type is usually mysteriously, independently wealthy, probably from all the hundreds of years he’s had to accumulate wealth…and take it from the people he’d eaten for breakfast. Edward Cullen doesn’t need a part-time job after school to afford to buy Bella Swan a new ride. Sometimes vamps have jobs: Charlaine Harris’s Eric Northman runs the Fangtasia night club, for example. But even if he isn‘t fabulously wealthy and/or his job isn‘t super-glamorous, vamps still make my blood run hot. Oliver of Love Bites, for example, may only be the head chef at a small seaside inn, but Oliver, sexy in a 1950s, James Dean kind of way, has all the right moves.

4. Contractor. Whether he’s a carpenter, a home remodeler, or the guy you hired to clean the pool, there’s something astoundingly sexy about the working-class hunks who work with their hands. As Jess says in “Bringing Eddie’s Lunch:”

“When Eddie is working, he’s a walking sexual fantasy. He wears tight carpenter jeans, with a hammer hanging from the hammer loop. He wears white T-shirts that are always, no matter what time of year, soaked with sweat. I love it when he’s swamped with work, when he’s too busy to get his hair cut. When he slicks his too-long hair back out of his eyes, he looks maddeningly sexy.” --The Mammoth Book of Erotic Confessions

3. Police officer. Fire fighters get all the glory, and cops get all the blame, right? Well, that psychology is part of what makes them such intense romantic heroes. Like their brethren in the big red trucks, the guys in blue run toward danger when everyone else is running away. They put their lives on the line to be real-life heroes. Case in point: Butch in J.R. Ward’s Black Dagger Brotherhood series. Though not traditionally handsome, the gray-eyed police officer is some complex, so charming, he wins the heart of the most beautiful, utterly devoted woman in his world.

2. Kindergarten teacher. What’s not to love about a guy who gets along great with the little tykes? It speaks to his potentially for excellent parenting skills, which of course go body part-in-body part with excellent baby-making skills. (See #9.) Observe kindergarten teacher Thom Reno in “Bomb Pop:”

“I thought of moving my pile of papers closer to where Thom sat, but that would have been inviting trouble. He must have noticed my red cheeks. To make matters worse, he looked especially good that day. He hadn’t shaved, and his black beard was at that perfect stage before it starts to get too messy. He wore the black corduroys, the ones that really flattered his butt when he stuck a hard pack of cigarettes in the back pocket. His rumpled, gray-striped sweater clung to his shoulders the way I, in off moments, wished I could.”

1. Bartender. I may be a little biased on this one, having been a bartender myself at one point (heck, I’ve been a contractor, too, for that matter…but I digress), but even if you’re not a big fan of Tom Cruise in Cocktail (which I’m not), there’s something mysterious and sexy about the guys who sling those colorful bottles of liquor behind swank bars. In her “God of Wine,” Dianne Fox modeled sexy-as-hell bartender Dean after the Greek wine god Dionysus. I had no such lofty references when I wrote Jace in “Iced” (The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica Vol. 9), but the erotic effect is the same.



According to her author bio:

Erin O'Riordan was raised by an illiterate French hitman after corrupt DEA agents murdered her family. Either that, or she watches too many Luc Besson films. She studied psychology and women's studies at a prominent Catholic women's college. Her erotic stories, essays, and film reviews have been published in numerous magazines and websites including The Erotic Woman, Oysters & Chocolate, and Clean Sheets. Though she has written about everything from professional basketball to her favorite literary sex scenes, the intersection of spirituality and sexuality remains one of her favorite themes. *Beltane,* her first novel, will be the first in the twelve-part "Pagan Spirits" series. Visit her at aeess.com.

Home: www.aeess.com
Blog: www.erinoriordan.blogspot.com

Reader Nomination: The Best Choral Version of a Pop Song.

It seems that Anonymous really lit a match in the powder keg that was the debate over Choral Versions of Pop Songs. You never know where the next great controversy will come from -- health care, choral versions of pop songs, what sauces are acceptable for Chicken McNuggets and what sauces aren't (hot mustard sauce is not, I'm sorry to have to tell you) but when the argument starts, all you can do is ride it out like Tarzan clinging to the vine for dear life...

... which brings me to today's nomination. Reader Rob.James has this to say about all the nominations so far:

This lot sound like someone set a bag of cats on fire compared to the greatest kids choir in the world:



That's the PS22 Chorus, and they have a site and all, and that site for some reason mentions Marcia Gay Harden -- I'm always surprised when she shows up, anywhere; she's the kind of person I figure shouldn't be showing up places -- and also mentions that David Hasselhoff is a fan of theirs (and Phil Donahue, who amazingly is still alive.)

The site goes on to mention more stuff about the PS22 Chorus, but why read about them when you can listen to them sing? They're awesome:







But I've saved the best one for last:



And, they're from Staten Island -- the most underrepresented (Least over-represented?) borough of them all!

Previous nominations in this category:

Sacramento State Jazz Singers.

Capital Children's Choir.

The original nomination (multiple songs.)

Click here for the ABCs of TBOE: An alphabetical listing of every topic ever discussed on this blog! (Yes, even that one!)

Just Exactly How Life Looks

Josh and Presley wander in the desert, alone with just their horses and those specks on the horizon. Josh is slowly going crazy, and Presley's not talking. That's Buzzards Loop, one of the brilliant stories you'll find in Just Exactly How Life Looks, the new collection of short stories I've published:



You can read Buzzards Loop for free on Scribd (click here). Purchase Just Exactly How Life Looks on Lulu.com (click here) or on your Kindle, starting at 99 cents.

The Best Sequels That Haven't Been Made Yet.

It's a SemiDaily List!

A while back, I mentioned in passing that I'd thought of a brilliant new sequel to the movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Within a month of posting that, studios announced that a Ferris sequel was in the works.

Well, I'm no dummy -- I know that Hollywood, and the whole world of entertainment, is not only afraid to make anything new or creative or original, but also that all of the Entertainment World reads my blog and cribs ideas from it. So as a break from my usual activities ("working out a way to get royalties from every single movie, book, TV show, and song made in the past several years/creating new snack foods), I've decided to yet again help out Hollywood by picking out movies that need sequels -- and then writing those sequels.

And, just to ensure that the movies do well, even if they're being marketed to a crowd that may or may not have heard about them, I've added in a surefire Hollywood gimmick to each, guaranteeing box office Gold. Ready? Let's get on with

The Best Sequels That Haven't Been Made Yet!

1. Close Encounters Of The Fourth Kind! The Plot: What's-his-name, the guy from Jaws... Mr Holland ... returns from traveling around outer space with the aliens -- this time, though, the aliens drop him off surreptitiously and he just shows up in his home town. As with the first abductees, time has passed while he's been gone and his children have grown up, and that one lady who was never in any other movies but who was kind of his love interest in the first one (only they never really played that up) is now dead. Mr. Holland won't talk about what he experienced up there, and in fact won't talk at all, not even after a couple of shadowy government operatives and that French guy find him and try to get him to cooperate... and not even when it's revealed that just outside of Saturn's orbit are hundreds of alien ships, whose purpose may or may not be friendly.

Ultimately, just before the world decides to try to strike at the aliens, Mr Holland breaks his silence and says that the aliens were taking captives to try to decide if humanity is ready to join the larger galactic civilization -- but that he didn't want to talk because he was too ashamed to admit he'd failed their tests. Now, it's up to a small team of humans to travel to the Saturn rendezvous to convince the aliens that we can be allowed not just to join them... but to survive!

The Pitch: District 9 meets Independence Day, with a touch of Star Trek.

Surefire Hollywood Gimmick To Guarantee Success: This will not just be a sequel, but will be a rebooting of the film, setting the Close Encounters movie up to be a series of films featuring Hollywood's youngest actors. Plus, it'll be in 3D!

2. Apocalypse Then: The Plot: Willard has been holed up in a shack in Montana, writing increasingly-odd sounding letters to the editor denouncing the U.S. Government and the military-industrial complex. One day, Willard is visited by government agents who offer him a choice: Help them one more time, or face charges as the alleged anthrax mailer. Willard denies ever having anything to do with the anthrax threat but knows that the government can bring him down, so he opts for the mission, which takes place in Afghanistan. There, Willard must befriend a warlord whose charismatic presence could be the key to finally defeating the Taliban -- but the warlord is friendly with the Taliban and must be swayed, or killed. And if he's killed, it has to be pinned on the bad guys.

Willard journeys to the rocky, blighted terrain of Afghanistan, where he is immediately attacked by villagers angry about a drone air raid killing women and children. Just before he is about to die, the warlord intervenes. Owing him his life, and knowing America has nothing left for him, Willard joins the warlord and helps him prepare to steal a tactical nuclear weapon just across the border in Afghanistan. In the final raid, US Special Forces prevent the theft, and kill Willard -- but the savagery of the fight propels the warlord to leadership, and into the arms of the Taliban.

The Pitch: Braveheart, only about the one modern war we can discuss without getting all bogged down in politics.

Surefire Hollywood Gimmick To Guarantee Success: The movie will star actual US Special Forces... and it'll be in 3D!

3. OZ! The Plot: Did you know that The Wizard Of Oz wasn't the only book Frank Baum wrote about Oz? There's, like, fifty books about Oz. How did nobody ever discover this before? I mean, I knew it, but, then, I'm kind of a nerd and I actually read all the books. However, because the rights to those movies would be kind of expensive, and because audiences are more sophisticated now and don't want simplistic morality tales unless those simplistic morality tales also involve giant blue cat-people, Oz! will update and expand on those follow-ups.

Oz! the movie picks up just after Dorothy left -- leaving the Scarecrow, the Lion, and the Tin Man with the task of deciding what to do now that the Wizard is gone. They try to set up a democracy, electing representatives of each of the areas of Oz, but their efforts are halted when Ozma, the claimed heir to the throne, demands that all democratic efforts be stopped and that people accept her rule. Ozma's background is cloudy, though, and it's soon revealed that Ozma was actually born a girl, but then was transformed into a boy and raised as such, only to be transformed back later on. [Note: This actually happened in the books.] Now, with her fearsome associate, Jack Pumpkinhead, Ozma is determined to take over Oz on behalf of her true leaders - the fairies, as it turns out Ozma is one of those, too. [Note: That's actually in the books, also.] Eventually, Dorothy must return to Oz and use an enchanted belt to help free Ozma from the various people demanding her allegiance so that Ozma can choose her own path. [Note: That kind of happened in the books, too!]

The Pitch: Imagine Oz as The Matrix, with fairies instead of those tentacle-y things. We can still have Lawrence Fishburne, though.

Surefire Hollywood Gimmick To Guarantee Success: One word: Action figures. Okay, that's two, but you get the point. Also, It'll be in 3D!


3. Kill Bill II, Vol. 1-2. Doesn't it bug you when people refer to Kill Bill as though it was two different movies? It bothers me. People are always saying "I liked Kill Bill 2 better than Kill Bill 1," even though, if you recall, the movie was one movie split into two parts because back then, nobody believed anyone would sit through a several-hours long movie. (Now, we know they will, but only if Sigourney Weaver is made up to look like a Thundercat.)

Doesn't it also bug you that there was never a follow-up to Kill Bill, probably because everyone already assumed that there had been a follow-up? Why wasn't there a sequel, when everything was just ripe for a sequel? Think about it: The Bride had made a bunch of enemies out there -- Lucy Liu's organization, for one thing, plus all the people who used Bill's services. There must have been someone who used his services, after all, right? Why else would he have an elite group of killers?

And, also, how do we know for sure that everyone was dead? Wasn't Elle Driver only presumed dead? [Note: She was. We never saw her die.] If The Bride could repeatedly die and come back, why couldn't at least one of the others?

In Kill Bill 2: Vol 1-2, we've flashed forward to where Beatrix's daughter B.B. is a teenager. Elle has enlisted the help of that pimp/mentor guy and has started up her own Kill-Bill-esque organization. Beatrix is living in the suburbs and trying to enjoy a quiet life. Elle correctly assumes that her best revenge on Beatrix will be to co-opt her daughter, and she does that, getting B.B. into her organization and secretly training her as a killer. Beatrix begins to suspect what's going on as B.B.'s grades fall, and confronts B.B., who runs away to achieve her destiny as the person who kills the president during the State of the Union. Beatrix must come out of hiding once again, this time to stop her daughter from committing the crime of the century.

The Pitch: Are you kidding? It's Kill Bill 2!

Surefire Hollywood Gimmick To Guarantee Success: Robert Pattinson will play the president. And, ... say it with me: It's in 3D!

4. Avatar 2: Electric Boogaloo: Too soon for a sequel, you say? Think again. We're not living in the kind of society where people will wait 2, 3, 4, or 20 years for a sequel. What are you, a George Lucas protege, you fossil? Strike while the 3D iron is hot, and before Sam Worthington's total jerkishness becomes apparent to people and they stop watching him altogether.

In Avatar 2: Electric Boogaloo, the story begins immediately after the close of Avatar. Sam Worthington has married what's-her-name... look, I didn't get anyone's name in the movie, okay? They didn't exactly have names. They might as well have been called archetypes and have their characters referred to as such, so that a scene could read: Unscrupulous, Profit-Hungry Corporate Executive Turns To Stock War-Hungry Marine Sergeant and says... so give me a break with the names.


Anyway, in Avatar 2: Electric Boogaloo, White-Man-Who-Learns-To-Love-Nature has married the girl, and now must deal with the impact of uniting all those tribes of Thundercats. While he may have ridden the Red Dragon (riding the red dragon could be slang for doing it, you know, if you kids would get on the ball and start having slang for doing it again, instead of just always 'sexting' each other), he's not entirely comfortable with all these people and customs and tribes yet, and it's not long before his leadership is challenged... specifically, at a banquet on the shore of the ocean-y blue people, where Sam cannot take part in all the rituals that the blue people love because he doesn't know them. Realizing he's still an outsider, the Blue People rally around the Sea Leader, who has a bold plan of mounting a pre-emptive strike against humans to keep them from ever coming back. (Using, um... space trees or something.)

Sam must stop them from re-starting the war all over again, and can do so through the only means left to him: Beating Sea Leader in a dance off! Studying Blue People dance moves in a montage with what's-her-name leads Sam to the Dance Arena on an island in the sea, where he'll have one chance to demonstrate that he's truly a Blue Person... or die.

The Pitch: Isn't Avatar still raking in something like $30 million per minute? How dare you question James Cameron? Off with your head!

Surefire Hollywood Gimmick To Guarantee Success: Never content to rest on his laurels, Cameron will again "up the ante" on Hollywood gimmickry: Ticket buyers will be fitted for their own prosthetic tail, which will plug into a special socket on their seat and let them feel the thoughts of the actors. What's that? You say you don't want a prosthetic tail? How dare you question James Cameron! Off with your head!




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Claudius wanted to be the first man to reach the stars... but it was murder to get there. Read Eclipse, the haunting sci-fi book from Briane Pagel. Available at Lulu.com and on your Kindle.