Wittenburg Door #201

I just received the good news that my humor piece, Dr. Philemon, is going to appear in issue 201 of The Wittenburg Door. It comes out in September. The satire imagines that the Philemon of the New Testament book is actually one Dr. Philemon, a self-help guru who feels the need to complicate St. Paul's plea for simple forgiveness.

In case you've never heard of it, The Wittenburg Door is "the world's pretty much only religious satire magazine." It has been delighting and/or horrifying readers since 1971. You can find subscription info by clicking here. The magazine also publishes a free biweekly newsletter that you can sign up for here.

Badsterpiece Theatre

Bad movies seem to be coming back into vogue: Entertainment Weekly recently ran an article on the almost 40 year-old Manos, The Hands of Fate; Showgirls is out on a special collectors edition DVD; The MST3K gang -- er -- The Film Crew is hosting movies on Encore; and even my little hamlet of Jamestown, New York is screening Barbarella (!) in a few weeks as part of a cult film festival. At this rate I fully expect that the Medved Brothers are going to receive a congressional medal of honor or something.

I just saw a movie that has to be one of the worst movies ever. It's not one of those so-bad-it's-good movies I endlessly prattle on about, but one of those so-bad-it's-bad flicks.

So bad as in "I'd rather watch any incomprehensible dubbed horror flick on a Wizard VHS."


So bad as in "I'd rather sit tight for an entire Full House marathon."


So bad as in "I'd rather study Ice Pirates starring Robert Urich frame-by-frame."

This ninety minute nightmare masquerading as a children's movie was called The Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl in 3-D. It was made by Robert Rodriguez, who I really admire. He made the Spy Kids series of films which I think are fantastic. Shark Boy and Lava Girl is technically awesome but falls completely flat in every other area. The story is incomprehensible. The acting is atrocious. I would go into more detail, but frankly I'm trying to block this film from my psyche.

The Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl in 3-D = RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!!!

Eleven Good Things About This Weekend

On Friday morning I got up to discover that some sad individual had smashed in the window on our minivan. It comes at a time when we really can't afford any additional expenses, but I was determined to not let some anonymous vagabond spoil my weekend. And he/she didn't. In fact, here are 11 good things about this weekend:

• Volunteering at my church's concession stand at the Warren County Fair. The Salvation Army crew put the fun in funnelcakes.
  
• Catching a 20+ year-old rerun of Saturday Night Live completely by chance that had Joel Hodgson as a guest.
  
• The roast beef, mashed potato and gravy dinner that the Pomona Grange was selling at the fair.
  
• Hearing from an old friend on Yahoo Messenger.
  
• Our church picnic at Chapman Dam that found everyone in a great mood.
  
• My brother getting released from the hospital.
  
• An extremely productive day at work.
  
• Taking a walk in the great outdoors.
  
• Lemonade on a hot day.
  
• Non-scented soap.
  
• Driving home at 11 pm to the sounds of the Kinks' Village Green Preservation Society CD.

I.F.'s Weird Dream of the Week

I was the Pastor of Spiritual Formation at a church, but I was really old. My hair and beard were a lot longer than they are now and had gone all white, too. I was wearing a comfortable Harris Tweed suit w/vest and a nifty bow tie. I was also wearing a scarf. Think Gandalf meets Oxford professor from the 1950s. Anyhow, I also had this cool wooden cane/scepter. I would point it at people and shout (in the nicest way) GLORIEAL! This would be accompinied by a quick flash of lightening and the loudest thunderclap ever. But no one was hurt -- on the contrary, they were all rather blissed out afterwards. It was obviously a very good thing!

GLORIEAL!

Where's Chris Hardwick now?

What's up with the WB49 News at Ten? Every time I watch the show there's a different anchor and reporters. Last night's anchor was a Jenny McCarthy lookalike to the point of being distracting: it was a pretty heavy news night but I kept expecting her to pull a funny face or grab her boobs or something...

Someone call Guinness!

I think this may be my laziest Saturday of all time. My day began when Lamont came upstairs to see if I were still alive, because it was 1:30 pm. I came downstairs and ate a leftover hamburger for breakfast while I looked at the super cool Kiddie Matinee website for what seemed like forever. And now I'm posting to Blogger, wearing a bathrobe and not much else.

Life is good.

Review: Doctor Who Season One

The residents of Experiment House were some of the lucky few in the USA privileged to watch the new series of Doctor Who. The science fiction show airs practically everywhere else in the world -- including South Korea, for Pete's sake -- but due to the apathy of American broadcasters, not in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

How did we acquire our copies of the program? Well, every Saturday evening between March and June we would hear a wheezing, groaning sound coming from the back yard of Experiment House. By the time we would get out there to investigate, the source of the noise (whatever it was) would be gone. But we'd find a DVD of that week's episode and a jelly baby sitting on the steps. I bet you have stuff like that happen to you all the time.

I've been a Doctor Who fan since I first watched it on WOR-TV back when I was a fifth grader in 1978. I've read the books. I own the DVDs. I even have a complete run of the American comic book that Marvel put out in the mid 80s. I just say that so you have some perspective on my fan geekiness -- even though the program had long since disappeared from television (and the public consciousness) it was still something I very much enjoyed.

The wait for the new series was almost unbearable. But strangely, when I received the premiere episode, Rose, I was almost afraid to watch it! I remember thinking, what if it sucks? In other words, what if the BBC took something I have dearly loved for almost thirty years and bungled it up? (Think The Phantom Menace...)

I was pleased to discover that the new series was a worthy successor to the original series. The story telling was much more mature, the special effects were great, and Christopher Eccleston and Billie Piper made engaging leads. Experiment House is a busy place, but for 45 minutes every weekend everybody stopped to see what The Doctor and Rose were up to this week. What follows is my ranking of the first season by order of preference:

#1. The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances
It always amazed me that the classic series never did a story set during the London blitz. Writer Steven Moffat corrected that omission in his two-parter and proved what a great backdrop it made for an exciting story. This was the highlight of the whole season for me, with the perfect balance of horror and humor, action and character development. I'm afraid of the bombs, Mummy became the catchphrase of the my son for weeks after. I'm so happy to hear that Steven Moffat is writing a story for season two!

#2. Father's Day
The new series continually pushed the boundaries of what constituted a Doctor Who story. Perhaps no single episode illustrates this so much as Father's Day. I can't imagine anything like this being attempted in the classic series. A show that was equal parts Twilight Zone and X-Files, Rose goes back in time and saves her dad from dying, only later to discover the disastrous consequences to her actions. Milking the tearjerker ending for all it's worth, Billie Piper steals the show.

#3. Rose
Rose, the episode that (re)started it all, has been criticized by some fans as rushing to a quick climax. (If I had a dime for everytime a woman criticized me with the exact same words, too -- bada-bing!) Some people don't seem to comprehend that Rose wasn't really about an Auton invasion at all. That was just the backdrop to the real agenda: introducing a new generation to The Doctor's world through the eyes of an average person. Take for instance the careful buildup to revealing the interior of the TARDIS, rather than just the "it's bigger on the inside than the outside" speech that sufficed in the classic series. In the weeks leading up to the premiere I wasn't sold on the leather jacket wearing Doctor, but I found that I "bought" Christopher Eccelston's performance from the second he appeared on screen and never gave a second thought to what he was wearing. A splendid premiere.

#4. Dalek
Everyone knows that The Daleks are baddies numero uno, but as an American who missed the Dalekmania of the sixties I could never quite comprehend what the big fuss was all about. Writer Robert Shearman showed me by demonstrating the horrifying destructive force of just one solitary Dalek in this "base under siege" story. I have to confess that I'll never look at the villains quite the same way. And when a whole army of Daleks appear at season end, I didn't need The Doctor to tell me that this was very bad news indeed.

#5. Bad Wolf/The Parting of the Ways
I'll admit it -- we Doctor Who fans are even bigger geeks than Trekkies. So you can imagine how I loved every second of the final two-parter of the season. The Daleks, with their menace recently reasserted, drew more from their TV21 comic strip version than anything ever seen on the TV show. From the spoof of reality TV to the Dalek massacre on Game Station, everything seemed designed to allow fans to get their "geek on." Christopher Eccleston, we hardly knew ye!

#6. Aliens of London/World War Three
Series One excelled at making The Doctor's universe more "real." This two-parter was the one that finally showed the aftermath left in the wake of a person disappearing off the face of the earth with The Doctor. It's not pretty. The "proper" adventure concerned farting aliens, a spacecraft clipping Ben Ben, and a cameo by A Pig In Space. This is the one that had my son saying BEST EPISODE EVER and if I were eight, I would have agreed.

#7. The End of the World
Following on directly from the premiere episode, The End of the World has many wonderful moments: Rose having a borderline freak out by being surrounded by so many aliens, hints about The Doctor's past, and how The Doctor and Rose console each other at the end. This episode demonstrated to me just how different this new series was going to be in its storytelling: The Doctor and his compainion weren't superheroes -- they were real people.

#8. Boomtown
A Slitheen returns in this lighthearted romp. Was I dreaming or did The Doctor and company really gadabout like the cast of Buffy, The Vampire Slayer?

#9. The Unquiet Dead
This tale of the walking dead in eighteenth century Cardiff was enjoyable enough, but nowhere near the classic that many fans make it out to be. It seemed like an attempt to recapture the gothic episodes of the 1970s, but the fast-paced action seemed out of step with the atmosphere. (Lamont and my daughter disagree with this review citing The Unquiet Dead as one of their favorite episode of the season.)

#10. The Long Game
This was my least favorite story of the season, despite the fun of seeing Simon Pegg as a guest star. Oddly enough, The Long Game was really all I was expecting from the new series: The Doctor lands at wherever, finds some injustice, sets it all right and leaves. The Long Game isn't bad by any means -- it just suffered from being stuck in amongst so many other gems that it just came off as a pedestrian runaround.

The first season of Doctor Who far exceeded my expectations. Despite my ranking of preferences, I can honestly say that there wasn't an episode I didn't enjoy in some way. I can't wait to see what the production team has planned for season two!

Pax Somnium

I had the most wonderful dream last evening. My family and I were having a traditional picnic -- basket, blanket and everything -- on my mom's property a little ways from her home. As we were setting up, Lamont remarked how wonderful it was that there would be no more terrorism or wars or bombs because everyone in the world had simply agreed that it made no real sense in the end. All the weapons had been dismantled. As I sat there eating my cold chicken, reflecting on the world, it occurred to me that I was different too -- I had let go of the anger and hurt and resentments towards other people I had been carrying around. I felt an overwhelming sense of peace and realized that everyone else in the world was feeling it too.