Isegoria

The season premier of Duck Dynasty drew 11.77 million viewers:

By comparison, only 2.7 million people watched the finale of the latest season of Mad Men. Even the much-anticipated series finale of Breaking Bad only got 10.3 million.

Naturally, we’re all shocked — shocked! — that the patriarch of a rural Louisiana family would consider homosexuality sinful. (Hah! He said, sinful! What a rube!)

Here’s what he said:

All you have to do is look at any society where there is no Jesus. I’ll give you four: Nazis, no Jesus. Look at their record. Uh, Shintos? They started this thing in Pearl Harbor. Any Jesus among them? None. Communists? None. Islamists? Zero. That’s eighty years of ideologies that have popped up where no Jesus was allowed among those four groups. Just look at the records as far as murder goes among those four groups.

[...]

Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality, sleeping around with this woman and that woman and that woman and those men. … Don’t be deceived. Neither the adulterers, the idolaters, the male prostitutes, the homosexual offenders, the greedy, the drunkards, the slanderers, the swindlers — they won’t inherit the kingdom of God. Don’t deceive yourself. It’s not right … We never, ever judge someone on who’s going to heaven, hell. That’s the Almighty’s job. We just love ’em, give ’em the good news about Jesus — whether they’re homosexuals, drunks, terrorists. We let God sort ’em out later, you see what I’m saying?”

[...]

I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the blacks, because we’re white trash. We’re going across the field. … They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’ — not a word! … Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.

His semi-apologetic statement:

I myself am a product of the 60s; I centered my life around sex, drugs and rock and roll until I hit rock bottom and accepted Jesus as my Savior. My mission today is to go forth and tell people about why I follow Christ and also what the Bible teaches, and part of that teaching is that women and men are meant to be together. However, I would never treat anyone with disrespect just because they are different from me. We are all created by the Almighty and like Him, I love all of humanity. We would all be better off if we loved God and loved each other.

I didn’t know anything about the show, really, but I still felt surprised by this:

Robertson was a star quarterback at Louisiana Tech. Indeed, he was starting quarterback, leaving fellow player Terry Bradshaw — who would go on to lead the Pittsburgh Steelers to four Super Bowl victories and eight AFC championships — in second on the team’s depth chart. The two reunited for the first time since college recently, as shown in the above video. While the Washington Redskins expressed interest in Robertson, he ultimately chose duck hunting over football, which ended up working out fairly well for him, all things considered.

John Denver and the Muppets: A Christmas Together aired in 1979 — and has never been released in any home video format. The Internet routes around such damage:

Space 1999 was a bit before my time, and I didn’t know what to think of a spoof from the producers of Honey Boo Boo, but their Kickstarter video is low-brow fun:

For comparison, here’s the first episode of the original show:

A fan has edited the original show into a tighter version he calls Space 2099.

Steve Sailer describes David Brooks’ The Thought Leader as Tom Wolfe-Lite social satire:

As a literary format for fictional social satire, Brooks’ method where the main character ages but society doesn’t has some major advantages for both author and reader. The most natural genre for novelists is the lightly fictionalized autobiographical novel, but what it was like to grow up in, say, Westchester County in the 1980s isn’t necessarily all that galvanizing a subject matter in 2013, especially for somebody of satirical bent: hair metal bands really aren’t that funny anymore. They’ve been done. We’re more interested in the author poking fun at what’s going on right now, but an autobiographical character can only live in 2013 for a year.

So, Brooks’ invention is to write an autobiographical novel always set in the eminently satirizable present.

The traditional alternative for a The Way We Live Now satirical novel is to invent a bunch of realistic characters of different ages and different backgrounds and have them interact in a well-crafted plot. But, that’s hard work. Wolfe, for example, only was fully successful at it in The Bonfire of the Vanities. Hence, this Brooks method has promise as a genre that shouldn’t demand as much talent and time from the author as traditional ones.

I presume somebody else in the long history of literature did this before Brooks, but off the top of my head, I can’t think of who.

In 1971, Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata were unable to secure Astrid Lindgren’s permission to adapt her Pippi Longstocking books — but they did produce some wonderful concept art:

E.E. “Doc” Smith’s Galactic Patrol comes as close to an immortal classic as a bit of juvenile pulp space opera can ever come, John C. Wright says:

I rate Smith in SF on the same level as Jack Kirby in comics: he is the king of a humble country, but still it is a thing passing brave to be a king.

[...]

Nowadays, it is more likely that an SF fan cannot read this work without being reminded of the later works copying it (STAR WARS is the most obvious example) and the fan will most likely be more familiar with the copies than the original, and regard the original, ironically, as derivative.

When I was a kid, desperate for a rumor about Revenge of the Jedi — it was still Revenge then, not Return — I remember hearing that it would feature an even bigger Death Star.

This is the kind of thing E.E. “Doc” Smith did all the time. Each book in the Lensman series introduces an enemy ten times as powerful as the last:

Each book is so cleverly constructed that it can be read independently, coming to what seems a perfectly satisfying conclusion with no loose ends, but in the first chapter of the next book the reader discovers that things are not what they seemed, and that the big evil black hat of the last book was himself but an agent of a higher, deeper, darker power from a race even farther away with even more psionic powers. This Russian Doll approach to writing sequels has been rarely tried, and this is the sole successful example of how to do it known to this writer.

It is a hard trick to pull off, and, as far as I know, Smith is the first author ever to attempt it. Each volume has to be completely satisfying in and of itself, with no dangling ends or odd mysteries left over (something Smith complained Edgar Rice Burroughs was guilty of–see GODS OF MARS for an obvious example), but also has to be open ended enough to smoothly mesh with the bigger picture once the curtains are drawn back even farther so that what you thought was the head of the dragon our hero just slew turns out to be one head of the Hydra, who turns out to have brothers bent on revenge, who turns out to have been sent out by some immortal from the underworld.

I am hard pressed to think of an example of such a thing being done once, much less four times in a row.

When “Doc” was writing, cars had just made fast getaways a powerful criminal tool:

[T]the very first scene of the first chapter establishes the science fictional speculation which is the core of the series, namely, what would be the effect of fast and cheap interstellar travel on society, specifically, on crime rates?

Organized crime, particularly acts of piracy, would be unstoppable: any wrongdoer on any world in the galaxy could flit to any other, commit robberies and slave-taking and mayhem, and be outside the range of local, continental, worldwide and system wide authorities faster than a radio wave (which moseys along at lightspeed) could spread the alarm. The impossibility of tracking a fleeing criminal in a space vessel is literally astronomical. If the fugitive goes to ground on a foreign world, inhabited by aliens whose language the pursuing police officer does not speak, whose customs he does not understand, and whose atmosphere he cannot breathe, the problem is even worse. If in addition, previous contact has been rare or none, the police officer also has the problem of identifying which shiny bent thing with leaves is the leader of the political organization, if any, the aliens possess, as opposed to which is the houseplant. More to the point for this story, the alien has the problem of discovering which of the two Earthmen just landed on his world is the police officer and which is the crook.

Obviously the scope of this problem depends on myriad factors, such as the frequency of alien contacts or the number of alien races, the speed of the ships, the ease of communication, the ease with which new territory can be discovered, and so on. But the international policing mechanisms and treaties used just here on Earth, if Earth were a ringworld or Dyson’s sphere and therefore had within sailing range a hundred continents instead of seven, or thousands, and a sailing ship could quickly reach destinations millions of miles away, all such treaties would be woefully inadequate. The solutions to organized crime on an interstellar scale do not ‘scale up’.

The answer in the Lensman universe is that a coldly superior race, called the Arisians, for reasons not revealed in the first volume, has granted to civilization a lens-shaped semi-living gem (or organism or device or thought-construct) which cannot be counterfeited, which cannot be used by anyone save the one soul to whom it has been attuned, and further kills anyone attempting to don it except the true owner. It is a badge that cannot be counterfeited. The Lens also acts as a telepathic sender and receiver and universal translator.

And, just to make things easy, the superior beings can identify beforehand who has the moral stature needed never to abuse the immense power of the lens, so no one but the Worthiest of the Worthy ever is given this badge of office. So the lens allows the police officer instantly to identify himself to any living intelligence on any world, telepathically display his good intentions and the honesty of his purpose, and understand any form of communication.

Unrealistic? Sure, but not any more so than the idea of Faster Than Light drive itself, or intelligent life on other planets.

The Lensman stories are the source of a ridiculous number of scif-fi tropes — including the Big Board, which became a real thing.

I remember The Dark Crystal as fairly dark and creepy, but apparently the final version wasn’t as dark and creepy as Jim Henson and Frank Oz originally intended. Now an obsessed fan’s own edit restores the darkness and the creepiness:

The earlier cut didn’t test well with audiences, so the film was substantially changed to appeal to a broad audience. Voiceover was added, and English dialogue was added to many scenes where the action was previously supposed to be understood through puppets’ pantomime.

For the past two years an enterprising fan, 31-year-old Christopher Orgeron, has labored to reassemble that original cut of the movie. He had limited materials to work with, so there are rough edges in many places (most notably the black-and-white scenes from a VHS dub of the original cut).

Artist Chris Panda has taken coloring book pages and sketched in the skeletons of the various cartoon characters:

(Hat tip to io9.)