Tagged: Star Wars

JOHN OSTRANDER: The Secret Death of Bees

ostrander100-1072015Okay, I’m officially getting freaked out now.

It started with a small remark from the redoubtable Bill Moyers when he appeared on Bill Maher’s Real Time show on HBO. I started to do some research based on his remarks and it came to a head recently with an MSNBC report on their website. It’s a real life event called “Colony Collapse Syndrome.” What’s it about?

The sudden death of honeybees.

“And this affects me – how?” you might ask. “I don’t use honey. I’m strictly a Splenda man. (Or woman.)” The fact is, a lot of food crops need to be cross-pollinated to come to maturity and the principle way of doing it is with the honeybee. About one-third of the American diet depends on cross-pollination and the honeybees that do the job are dying out and nobody really knows why.

According to the MSNBC article, 80% of the cotton crop is pollinated by commercial honeybees. Same for 50% of the soybean crop. Use cotton or soybeans much? 60% of the alfalfa crop is pollinated the same way. Alfalfa hay is a staple for cows – low cost, good nutrition for the bovines. Drink milk? Having a Big Mac attack? Scarcity of an item increases its price and you can bet a jump in the price of alfalfa hay will be passed on to the consumer. Same for cotton or anything made with soybeans. How much do you feel like paying for your jeans? I haven’t even gotten into the fruit and nut cross-pollination done by bees – almonds, for example, are 100% dependent on bee pollination.

Cereal grains aren’t affected so we wouldn’t starve. We’d have to do without a number of items, though, or pay a heck of a lot more for them. Oranges, grapefruit, and tangerines, for example, are all 90% dependent on commercial honeybees for the cross-pollination. You could have your Cheerios in the morning but having milk to put on them or an OJ to go with it might be tougher to get or a lot more expensive to use.

As my Mary, a farmer’s daughter, also pointed out to me, alfalfa, soybean and clover crops (clover is also cross-pollinated) put nitrogen back into the soil. Very important in crop rotation. If you just plant corn all the time, you deplete the soil and – wham! – you’re headed for a dust bowl situation. There are indirect as well as direct effects from the death of honeybees.

What’s really weird is what’s happening with the hives. The onset is sudden. The beekeepers, after a few days, find that a hive suddenly is empty except for the queen and some very young workers. Bees don’t do that. They protect the hive at all costs. In the case of hives afflicted with CCD, the workers just disappeared.

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Spider-Man 3 cures world hunger!

It’s even more ridiculous, folks.

Nikki Finke updates the running tally with the global numbers: Spider-Man 3 has produced the biggest worldwide opening ever with $375 million, upsetting the previous record of $254 mil by Star Wars Episode 3. The overseas estimates from 107 countries total $225 mil; pic was the biggest film debut ever in at least 26 countries including Russia, China, Italy, South Korea, Japan.

SM3 also shattered all the North American records (U.S. and Canada) for biggest opening day ever, biggest second day of release and biggest third day of release. Though SM3 fell -14% Saturday compared to Friday, that number without the midnight shows is actually +4%. This means that, comparatively, the threequel almost did in two days what the original Spidey did in three days back in 2002.

Robot Chicken/Star Wars trailer up

A little something for you to watch while you’re waiting for that movie on line (get it? You’re on line for the movie and you’re online reading this! It’s a pun! Hah! I’m so clever I make myself sick!)

Hat tip: Lisa Sullivan.

Star Wars goes postal

From Michael Pinto at Fanboy.com:

You wouldn’t think the plans for the Death Star would fit in a first-class envelope, would you?

You can also put a Star Wars stamp on that envelope.

JOHN OSTRANDER: You say it’s my birthday

I share my recent birthday with a bunch of notables; unfortunately, the most famous is Adolf Hitler. I thought it would be it would be good to use the day in part for some ruminations – where I am, where I’ve been, what I foresee, fear, et al. Actually, I can do that any day of the year; a birthday is really just a number and some of what we ascribe to that date is arbitrary. Still, might as well make use of what we got.

One thing that is about my birthday fixed is that I share it with my twin brother, Joel. Joe and I are fraternal twins; we don’t look alike, sound alike or even sometimes think alike. Joe is a conservative Republican and I decidedly am not. Joe is a life member of the NRA; I decidedly am not.

However, when I called him on our shared birthday – which I always do – he picked up the phone and started doing his Elmer Fudd imitation, which I also did. It’s the way we start every phone conversation, usually with Elmer singing something inappropriate. We’ve been doing this long before Robin Williams did. We agree that Elmer is vastly unappreciated and has an extraordinary range, from the Stones and Springsteen to show tunes (he has an affinity for Lerner and Lowe – Fudd doing “Why Can’t the English Teach Their Children How To Speak?” from My Fair Lady may be the definitive rendering of that song). He also can do Shakespeare, especially Hamlet, and could play Stanley in Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire; “Stehwwwwwaaaaaa!”

That is part of what forms me – family. In addition to Joe I have three sisters – Marge, Jane, and Pat. All wonderful people and all of them have dirt on me – as I do on them. I have an Aunt Helen who is going to 100 years old in June; her father also lived to be 100. So there is that in my DNA, although my father died much younger than that.

We lived across the street from the Roman Catholic church that I attended; I literally played in its shadow. While these days I am something on an agnostic – my gag is that I’m not dogmatic about it – I am very specifically a Roman Catholic agnostic. The god I have questions about is the image formed by the Roman Catholic upbringing. I was raised pre-Vatican II, back in the days when the Masses were in Latin. That also may be in my DNA.

I’m one of the baby boomer generation. I can’t quite remember a time before television but I remember a time when it was all in black and white. I can still reel off the names of most of my favorite shows – Zorro, Rocky and Bullwinkle, Ernie Kovacs (I was a strange kid), Fractured Flickers, Beany and Cecil, Garfield Goose (a Chicago kids TV show), Jack Paar when he had on Oscar Levant or Jonathan Winters (I was a very strange kid) and others. I remember the British invasion; as an early teen, I ushered at the Beatles concerts in Chicago. I was resistant to the Beatles until I saw A Hard Days Night; that’s when I became a fan. All part of my cultural DNA.

I got into theater because a Catholic girls H.S. was looking for boys to be part of their next production. A girl I liked attended that school and – well, c’mon. Being one of a few boys inside a girls’ high school? Of course you’re going to go there. I almost never saw the girl but the teacher/director – Mrs. Crawford – thought I had potential. I discovered the stage and that would form a great part of my life for the next almost twenty years. It also helped make me into the writer I am today. (more…)

JOHN OSTRANDER: Odd Delights

  • News
  • April 26, 2007

getcrazy4-4703726I hesitate to recommend films these days – what I like you may well loathe. That said – having burdened you with a collection of “perverse pleasures” recently, I thought I’d devote this column to films that I own that I truly do enjoy, that I think are good films, and which you may not know.

Get Crazy is a 1983 film from Allan Arkush, who also directed the cult classic Rock And Roll High School and is an executive producer of Heroes. I came across it in the company of Timothy Truman while we were at a convention. We were staying at a distributor’s house and were too tired after the day’s proceedings to move. The distributor had the (then) novelty of projection screen TV and cable and Tim and I had a few beers as Get Crazy came across the screen. It sucked us in. At the time, we couldn’t decide if it was the beers or because we were exhausted but it seemed to us to be one of the funniest movies ever made. I’ve watched it many times since and it wasn’t the beers or the exhaustion; this is a damn funny film.

IMDB posts this plot synopsis of the film: “Mega-promoter Colin Beverly plans to sabotage the New Year’s 1983 concert of small-time operator Max Wolfe. Wolfe’s assistants Neil Allen and Willie Loman find romance while trying to save the drugs, violence, and rock and roll from Beverly’s schemes.” Fair enough so far as it goes but it barely scratches the surface.

To start off with, Colin Beverly is played by white-on-white Ed Begley Jr. in a terrifically manic mode. In a stroke of brilliance, his two henchman are played by two former teen idols, Bobby Sherman and Fabian Forte. That is hip, intelligent casting and a great joke in and of itself. The movie is full of little nods like that. Lee Ving, the frontsman for the punk band Fear, plays a punk musician called Piggy who has to be chained up when not performing. (Ving was also in another fave film of Brother Tim and myself, Streets of Fire.) Howard Kaylan of The Turtles plays a Jerry Garcia-ish Captain Sky. You don’t have to get all the in-jokes and references for the movie to work but boy do they add to the movie.

Malcolm McDowell plays Reggie Wanker, who is an amalgam of Rod Stewart and Mick Jagger. One of his band mates – Toad – is played by John Densmore of The Doors. How damn hip do you want a movie to be? And he looks so much like Keith Richards in the film, he could be Keith’s long lost brother. One of the best scenes is late in the movie when Wanker has a talk with himself in the men’s room after getting very high. I can’t tell you why without spoiling the joke but, trust me, it’s LOL funny.

But the absolute best guest shot has to be Lou Reed playing a character named Auden who is heavily modeled on Bob Dylan circa 1983. The in-joke is that you have a recluse (at the time) playing a greater recluse (at the time). Even if you don’t know the reference, the part is written and performed as to have its own laughs. Plus, Reed has a great song by the end of the film, "My Little Sister."

There’s others such as Paul Bartel of Eating Raoul in a bit part as Max’s doctor, Bill Henderson as King Blues and Franklin Ajaye as his driver, and more. There’s tons of music including at last three versions of “Hoochie Koochie Man.” And as much schtick as in any Police Squad movie. (more…)

MIKE BARON on writing

  • News
  • April 22, 2007

mbaron4-3792218Writers are people who have to write. They write every day. They don’t talk about it, they do it. People who don’t write every day are not serious writers. All right. Five days a week, minimum. This is about writing comic books, but it applies to all fiction.

You must know your craft, the rules of grammar, how to conjugate a verb. Don’t get nervous. Most of you already know this without the fancy labels. I see, you see, he sees. It is part of your instinctive grasp of English. Everyone needs a little book of rules. For the writer, it is Elements of Style by Strunk and White. This slim volume has been in continuous publication since 1935. It takes an hour to read and is quite droll. Buy a used copy. Do not get the illustrated version. It has been bowdlerized in the name of pc.

All good fiction, whether comics or otherwise, is built around character. We humans are mostly interested in our own kind. The more interesting your protagonist, the better your story. Stories start with people. The TV show House on Fox is a perfect example. Hugh Laurie’s character is so thorny and unpredictable people tune in week after week out of fascination with his personality. Same thing with Batman, since Denny O’Neil straightened him out. Prior to O’Neil, Batman wandered from mood to mood, often “humorous,” seldom entertaining. Denny made Batman a self-righteous obsessive-compulsive. Obsession is always interesting.

While it’s possible to grow a great story out of pure plot, sooner or later it will hinge on the characters of your protagonists. “Character is destiny” holds true in fiction as well as life. Know who your characters are before you start writing. Some writers construct elaborate histories for each character before they begin. It is not a bad idea. Start with people then add the plot. Get a bulletin board. Write each character’s name and salient characteristics on a 3 x 5 card and tack it to the bulletin board. You can do the same with plot points. You can move characters and plot points around to alter your chronology.

What is plot? It’s a dynamic narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. It’s like a good pop song. It has to have a hook. Sometimes that hook is simply the narrator’s voice. Huckleberry Finn succeeds mostly on the strength of Huck’s voice, by which I mean the way he presents words. In other words, it’s not the meat, it’s the motion. It’s not what you say, it’s the way that you say it. Huck comes alive through his words, which are fresh and immediate. We feel we know Huck. Same thing with Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe. It’s that world-weary, cynical with a heart-of-gold voice whispering in your ear. “He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.” Chandler also said, “A good story cannot be devised, it has to be distilled.” In other words, start with character and let character find the plot.

Comic writers think visually. No matter how bad our chops, we can pretty much describe what we see in words. Some of us can even draw a little bit. I used to write comica by drawing every page out by hand – everything – all the tiny details, facial expressions, warped anatomy, half-assed perspective, all word balloons and captions. Editors and artists loved it. Why? Because they had everything they needed on one page instead of spread across three pages of single-spaced type. Some of the most successful writers in the industry write very densely. Each script is a phone book.

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JOHN OSTRANDER: Perverse Pleasures

  • News
  • April 19, 2007

c86650lf4qn-8422755We all know what a “guilty pleasure” is – some movie, book, song, whatever that we are ashamed to say we actually like – nay, sometimes love. While we may be embarrassed by our affection we should, at the very least, be able to claim, “Well, anyway, I like it.” Even if nobody else does. I have my list of those and I suspect you do as well.

This is not the same as the strange, little known things that you love that are, in fact, pretty good. I have my list of those things also and it might be useful to talk about these odd delights at some other time.

Neither of the above are the same as what I call my “perverse pleasures.” I’m not talking about sexual kinks and peccadilloes. I’m talking about music, books, movies and so on that I know, in fact, are awful and that I don’t like but feel a weird compulsion to own them anyway.

On to confession.

The first item is Pat Boone’s 1997 CD In a Metal Mood; No More Mr. Nice Guy wherein the King of White Bread Music decides to do his covers of Heavy Metal songs. We’re talking songs such as Stairway to Heaven, Smoke on the Water, Love Hurts, Enter Sandman and plenty of others. Oh, my ears! He doesn’t do them as Heavy Metal, of course; his arrangements turns them into Big Band tunes. When Mr. Boone sings, he’s usually off the rhythm, flat, or just speaks the lyrics. I have yet to get through a complete cut.

This is completed with a cover shot of the aging Mr. Boone in leather pants, leather vest, and no shirt, fixing the buyer with a steely stare that defies said buyer not to purchase the CD. I, of course, succumbed.

To top it all off, I was doing a guest shot on my friend Bill Nutt’s radio show, The Nutt House, on WNTI. I decided to play a cut of the CD on his show. Hey, they’re not my ratings. My better half, the lovely and talented Mary Mitchell, was listening in. I should explain that Mary is a heavy metal fan. Most people wouldn’t suspect it to look at her but she’s pretty knowledgeable and has her criterion: a good heavy metal band should look and sound like trolls. Pat Boone comes nowhere near that ideal.

Mary asked me what was on my mind to play that track. I explained that none of us at the radio station actually listened to it; we turned off the monitors about thirty seconds into the song so we didn’t have to listen to it. I think that’s where I lost Mary as a regular listener to my radio hijinks. She did listen to the track all the way through.

This is one of my definitions of love – despite having trick-bagged her into listening to something that I couldn’t, she still cares about me.

If Mary hasn’t found the CD, I probably still have it around somewhere.

Wandering over to the DVD section, I find my copy of Barb Wire. I knew the Dark Horse comic on which the movie was based and stumbled on the movie starring Pamela Lee Anderson while channel surfing late one night. I, like millions of Americans, ignored it in its theatrical release but I thought it was worth pausing long enough to see if Pam popped out of whatever she was wearing. It was late night and my standards of viewing are pretty low after midnight. (more…)

JOHN OSTRANDER: Hurling stones

  • News
  • April 12, 2007

ostrander100-9025781I had a couple of other topics I was going to work on but then I read Mike Gold’s column this week and decided I had enough to say to on it and the subject of his column that I might as well do it in my own. Thanks, Mike, for supplying my column this week!

The question at hand was Don Imus’ racist remarks on his show, categorizing Rutgers University’s women’s basketball team (the majority of whom are black) as “nappy headed hos.” (For short, and because I don’t want to perpetuate the comment by repeating it endlessly, we’ll just reduce it to   “nhh”.)

Imus has since apologized at length, doing the mea culpa circuit that prominent white men do when they get caught putting their feet in their mouths. There have been the chorus of calls for Imus’ resignation or firing and Imus has said he was just trying to be funny and he’s really a nice guy and so on. As I write this, Imus has been suspended by CBS radio for two weeks and MSNBC has dropped the television show. After a ritual flogging on the Rev. Al Sharpton’s radio show, Imus is now scheduled to meet with the women he actually insulted and their families. Nice to know we’re all keeping our priorities straight.

Caveat: I don’t listen to Imus. If I’m listening to radio in the morning it’s generally NPR and I don’t do that very often. So I’m getting a lot of this second hand or worse. I’ve never been into the whole “shock jock” thing so you can take what I have to say with that grain of salt. Also, I’ve had my own brush with hoof in mouth disease in a script where I referred to Asian people as Orientals. As has been driven home to me, Orientals are rugs; people are Asian. So I am not within sin. I’m throwing rocks anyway.

Let’s talk about Imus first. My first reaction on hearing all this was, “What an incredibly stupid thing to say.” Imus has been in the game long enough and he knows the field. He has no internal censor that suggested to him for a half second that referring to African-American women as “nhh” just might get him into trouble? Frankly, I always had the impression that Imus was sharper than that.

And then the cynical Chicagoan side of me kicked in. Maybe Imus’ attitude at the time was “Well, remarks like this sure gets people talking about ya, doesn’t it? Good, bad – does it matter so long as they don’t forget you?” Now people might listen in to hear how contrite you are, or if you’ll do it again, or because they think you should do it again. What’s a shock jock without a controversy? Or maybe he didn’t expect people to get upset – stuff like this has been his stock in trade, right? Isn’t it why people listen? Imus says what a lot of people think – isn’t that the justification? The current brouhaha is just a matter of degree.

I wonder – what would the reaction have been if it was the Rutgers men’s basketball team that lost in the Finals (they didn’t even get that far) and Imus had called them “nh (fill in the blank).” Actually, I’m betting nothing would have happened because Imus would have realized, before he said it, that it was going too far. But these are just female jocks. Who really cares, eh? Let’s call them whores because they lost a freaking basketball game. Maybe if Imus had just stuck with being misogynistic instead of racist, he would have been okay.

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