It’s Not Happening

Boom got Slogged!  Woo hoo!  Good catch, Jill.  Are you adding political journalism to your business card?

Watch the trailer for Blood Car…if you dare. If you can’t take gallons of fake blood spurting from concealed hoses in people’s clothes, stay away, but this could be the best slasher satire yet.

This lovely little site has three of the silliest web celebrities of the past few years shaking their business in defense of net neutrality.  The video is quite funny, and while I’m not 100% sure that Gem Sweater Lady is who she says she is (her boombox costime is awesome but off-message), the other two are legit as far as I can tell.

It’s kind of a web nerd quiz: if you’ve been to all three sites previously, you should probably ask Bush to pony up a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

If you’re not familiar with the classic BBC comedy Yes Minister and its sequel Yes Prime Minister, you are culturally bankrupt. Well, maybe not that far gone – and I know it’s ridiculous for me to accuse anyone else of moral, spiritual or cultural bankruptcy, so don’t bother commenting. It was one of those rare confluences of fantastic writing, spot-on performaces and freedom from network restrictions that create good television (See Arrested Development.)

The series as a whole covers a chunk of the career of MP Jim Hacker, who stumbles upward from the back bench to a Ministry (think Cabinet position), and then all the way up to Prime Minister. Each episode lays out the sausage-making details of the British government, though it’s not hard to draw strong parallels with other democratic systems. The brilliant Nigel Hawthorne played Hacker’s nemesis, Sir Humphrey Appleby, who, while technically his subordinate, represented the inertia and interests of the Civil Service – which rarely coincided with those of their political masters. The wordplay and naked cynicism were transcendent, and nothing quite like it has been seen since.

This book reprises each episode of the final two series brilliantly, as collections of diary entries, memos, radio transcripts, and other historical bits and pieces. This technique adds to each story, so the collection is much more than a series of narrative reductions. The authors adopt a sweetly snarky editorial voice throughout.

While some elements are dated, for the most part each chapter illuminates a hidden aspect of government, and overall makes the case that gridlock may be the best that we can hope for.

Breathlessness doesn’t age well, but good fiction does. This collection of essays inspired by Vernor Vinge’s genre-defining novella True Names is mostly worth reading only as a snapshot of late-90s net-thinking. While I will confess to a certain nostalgia for the sense of infinite possibility some of us shared back then, rereading it now is as painful as looking over old high school yearbooks.

But the novella, tacked on at the end, is lovely. Vinge invented cyberspace in 1979, years before the premature advent of Virtual Reality and William Gibson’s coining of the word that would make life easier for generations of technophobic magazine editors. Envisioning computer networks as imaginary realms accessed by technologically enhanced self-hypnosis, Vinge seemed to realize that he had stumbled on something big and crazy and exciting – a new metaphor that fit perfectly. The trouble is, of course, that our tech hasn’t come close to catching up with this miracle concept. But it took decades for NASA to catch up with Jules Verne, so it seems reasonable to wait patiently – and until then, we’ve got loads of great cyberfiction to keep us entertained.