Analysis: Gays actually supported Prop 8

Looking carefully at the donor database for California Proposition 8 (the proposition that simultaneously eliminated gay marriage, same-sex marriage, genderless marriage, and homosexual marriage in this state) startling information emerges: Gays actually donated in greater numbers and greater amounts for proposition 8 than against it. Donors such as Gay Rudek, Gay Lee Butterfield, and Jon Gay narrowly outnumbered the anti-prop-8 folks such as Jeff Gay, Joan Gay, and photographer Gay Block.

Please note that for this study, only those individuals who self-identified as “Gay” were included. The Gayles, Agaylas, Gaytans, and even the Gaylords were not included, although many of them may casually be Gay. (Raw data available here.)

This information brought to you by the Thoroughly Useless News Network – the news you don’t need, when you don’t need it.

Context, people, context

I stumbled across this respected-author New York Times blog in which they were discussing “Why do animated films use such famous voices?” It’s built around Coraline, and the author says “I have to believe that there are a group of voice actors and books-on-tape readers who don’t have the faces to be movie stars but have great voices.”

To which I respond — wha-hunh? The stars of Coraline are Dakota Fanning, Teri Hatcher, and John Hodgman. In what universe is Teri Hatcher a movie star, if you don’t count Coraline? In what universe does John Hodgman have the face of a movie star?

This blog must’ve been written from the land of the other mother.

Good news if you're not me

TheCW has announced that they’re renewing six shows that I wasn’t watching.

No announcement if they’re picking up either of the series that I am watching (the guilt pleasure Privileged and the I’m-watching-it-again-now-that-it-has-a-convenient-time-slot Everybody Hates Chris.)

Dollhouse

“Trust in Joss” has lng been a motto around here. Meant to get us past the we’re-not-sure-where-this-is-going portions of Buffy, this has served us well with other Joss Whedon projects. And I think I’m gonna have to rely on this for a while with Dollhouse.

Dollhouse tells the tale of a mysterious private agency which temporarily imprints mind-wiped agents with memories and abilities to do, well, whatever they’re paid to do. This individual episodes are about the assignments of one such agent, with running backstories about those looking to bring the agency down.

The tricky thing here is that this is humorless. Unlike the centrally comedic concept of Buffy (around which much good drama was built) and the strong core of humor running through Firefly, there is none here. Even when characters are bantering between themselves in humorous fashion, at bst it’s humorous to them, not to the viewer.

This lack of humor means that the everything has to work when you take it seriously. Unfortunately, some of what they do lacks contextual believability. The major huge budget sceince-stretching initiative runs with one scientist? The constant scientific explanations that come down to nothing more than “we need a script reason to let us do this nifty thing”? They don’t fly. Not being carried along for comedic reasons, and not able to invest myself in it seriously, its not working for me. Not yet, at least.

Maybe I’m just not a let-go-and-let-the-action-take-you kind of guy.  But Joss has earned a long chance to get the pieces in order here. And if it doesn’t pay off, then I hope he gets another series swiftly.

Oscar notes 1

• Remember my comment about not having seen this year’s Oscar films? Well, animation is the big exception. Not only had I seen all three of the nominees (Bolt, Kung-Fu Panda, Wall-E), but I saw all of the movies they ran during the montage (those three, Tales of Despereaux, Horton Hears a Who, Space Chimps, Madagascar 2 and even Star Wars Clone Wars, the one for which I didn’t have the excuse of going with wee Allison.)
• The choice of Tina Fey and Steve Martin to give the writing awards makes me happy, not just because they’re two people I like who work well together, but because they are both quite respectable writers.
• There was some talk about them building a storyline into the show to keep people interested. I don’t know what they consider to be a storyline; it overall seems like a basic, kinda bland Oscars.

That word, it does not mean what you think it means

So there’s this ad on for Life on Mars, and it’s talking about how the cops on the show have seen much in their day… “but one thing they’ve never seen is murder inside their precinct!”

Really? That must be the safest district in New York!

Sudsy Scrubs

The always-hanging-on-by-skinny-teeth series Scrubs is showing its age. It’s not finding much fresh room at this point, much of what it has to say is just a comment on the show itself, and running two episodes in a row each week is just hammering it in.

But that’s not to say that there’s nothing fresh in it this season. There is — and it’s all in Gooch, the cute ukelele-playing girlfriend for Ted. I kept thinking I’d seen her somewhere before, but I was wrong… but I’m finding her ukelele-playing charm elsewhere. (Not safe for the sort of workplace where “not safe for work” things aren’t safe.)[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilOx2Jmm1r4&feature=player_embedded]

What went wrong on SNL?

Something was funky on SNL last night. Toward the end, they ran two rerun fake commercials in a row. Yes, they have a long history of rerunning their fake ads, but two in a row sounds like a desperation fill-in move, like something that they expected to be done couldn’t be at the last minute. Or perhaps they edited out something from the West Coast feed (that’s the curse of living on this side of the country; any interesting flubs can get fixed before we see them.) And then, leading in to the goodnights, they had up an SNL title screen for an oddly long time.

uncomforting reassurance

I just saw an ad for… my gosh, I was laughing so hard I missed the title. It’s some Nick Cage end-of-days movie. Real over-the-top disaster stuff, with a strong sense of cliche. But it ended with a scene where Cage is huddled in some corner with his young son.

SON: Are we gonna die?

CAGE: I will never let that happen.

The definition of a failure-bound protagonist: one whose successful show of power depends on he and his son never dying.

The fault with no fault

Assuming the courts rule that Proposition 8 is acceptable and that it will be interpreted as it seems on the surface, that will disolve thousands of marriages. “Dissolved” is the proper California term; legally, we don’t have divorce, we have dissolution.

Now, California is a no-fault divorce state; the usual official reason for dissolution is “irreconcilable differences”. I suppose the official cause of all these new dissolutions would be “irreconcilable lack of differences”.