I spend a lot of time griping about various things, so I thought I’d score one for the good guys. The other day I was sorting through yellow Lego pieces and remembered that the Naboo Starfighter I bought a few years ago had some incorrect parts in it. I went to the Lego website and told them what parts I needed. Today they came in the mail. They didn’t cost me anything, and they didn’t ask for the incorrect parts.

Now, that’s service. But that’s not all. This error in packing is only the third time this has happened. In my twenty-plus years of buying many, many Lego sets, only three times have I gotten incorrect parts. The first time was when I was a kid, and my Galaxy Explorer came with a wrong piece. I wrote to them, drew a picture of the piece I needed, and they sent it to me. The second time the missing piece was a very minor thing that I have a million of anyway, so I didn’t bother with it. This was the third time. How is that for quality control?

In addition, remember my AT-TE Review, when I said that the legs were unusually fragile? Turns out they’ve revamped the design a little bit to give the legs some extra strength. I called the company, put in a request, and a couple days later I received, free of charge, a revised instruction book and the necessary pieces.

Now, obviously I’m a fan of Lego in the first place, but this is the kind of quality and service that made that happen. Too often companies try hard to figure out why problems with their products aren’t their fault. Here’s a company that works hard to avoid those problems in the first place and handles them easily and cheerfully when they do.

Though I’m an avowed skeptic, I enjoy me a good kook every now and then. So much so that it bugs me on TV when, to denote someone as being a kook, they always bring up some weird belief involving Elvis. Elvis isn’t kooky. He was at one time, but he is not at all in the kook mythology. There are far more interesting, zany, and pervasive elements out there, and a wacky belief in Elvis isn’t so much a signal of kook to me than it is a signal of lazy writer. But maybe that’s another story.

Kooks these days aren’t quiet people with secret knowledge, huddled in libraries and bookstores and bars and wherever else kooks hang out. They’re quiet people with secret knowledge broadcasting it on the web for everyone to see. So fervent are they in their desire to spread the truth that nearly every one of them screams their esoteric missives in 36-point multicolored type, usually adorned by as many animated graphics as the screen can hold.

Being a kook is a lot of work these days. Time was when you could just believe that secret Jewish assassins killed Kennedy or that Bigfoot was an alien and your work was done. But for some reason, nowadays, you have to work your particular bizarre belief into a vast tapestry of other beliefs, a Grand Unified Theory of Kook, if you will. Nowadays, you can’t just say that robots from Venus walk among us, you have to also explain how this fits in with Nostradamus, Hopi Legends, Crop Circles, Poltergeists, Contrails, Crystals, Atlantis, and, of course, “Quantum Mechanics”, the primum mobile of any decent kook theory. (I put that term in quotes to distinguish the “Quantum Mechanics” of the kook world from the Quantum Mechanics of the world of people who actually know something about science.)

The kooks are funny. There’s something amusing about watching adults talk seriously about magic spells, faeries, and teleportation. But when their beliefs start spilling into reality as the rest of us know it, it suddenly becomes not as funny. For example, imagine if your child came home from school and told you she was learning about how all human life is the result of aliens seeding Earth with DNA. Or if your doctor told you that, in lieu of a cast on your broken bone, he was going to pour a libation to Mercury. Or if your boss announced that from here on out, all corporate decisions were being handled by Madame Zabooshka and her crystal ball. In each case you’d probably have a problem with it.

So here’s the hairy part, and I am trying to find a way to express this without offending a lot of people. Let’s look at three situations currently in the news.

First, the tragic events in Milwaukee, where an 8-year old autistic boy died during a prayer service to heal him. In the initial report, the pastor, David Hemphill, says, “God is a mysterious person, and if he wants to call a life back, he does.” It turns out that God’s ways were a little less mysterious than that. Two days later it was reported that the boy was smothered to death by adults trying to drive spirits out of his body.

We next turn our gaze towards Alabama, where a huge battle is being waged over a monument of the Ten Commandments. It was removed to an undisclosed location but there’s still an uproar about this. The debate centers over the line between church and state, sure, but it also mixes in the idea that there can be no law, morality, or justice without God — specifically, the Christian God. As usual, since this one monument has been deemed inappropriate for a government building, supporters are presenting this as evidence that we live in a country where Christians are harshly persecuted for their beliefs.

Finally, I’d like to point out that our own esteemed leader, George Bush, feels he has been “chosen by God” to lead this country. Of course, the notion that a president could be anything but a practicing Christian is absurd, so this is nothing new, but stop and consider what this implies, especially when you mix in that Bush’s Christianity is the Apocalypse-embracing “End Times” type.

“Legomancer, are you equating rational belief in the One True God with astrology, aliens, and unicorns?” Well, I’ve done worse in the past, but no, I’m really not saying that. What I’m trying to say is, please join us in the twenty-first century, folks!. Here in 2003, we no longer can blame our bad attitudes on the retrograde movement of Mars. We now know that viruses, germs, and genetic problems cause illness and health problems, not spirits. We no longer believe that our leaders rule by divine right instead of by the will of the people. Our laws exist to promote harmony among people and not to avoid being sent to fiery damnation. Believe what you want to believe, live by whatever code you choose, but no one else should have to suffer from it, whether that means they aren’t smothered to death, don’t have airplanes run into their buildings, aren’t required to honor your totems, or don’t have to obey laws that serve no purpose except to enforce your belief system.

It’s nice here in 2003. No, there aren’t unicorns and fairies and magic and stuff like that, but we still enjoy hearing about pretend worlds where those are real. And we have a lot of other things that are just as cool. We kind of have to take responsibility for our own actions, which sometimes sucks, but on the other hand we also get to take credit for the good stuff we do, so that’s a plus. And don’t get me wrong, we still have religion here, but some of us have decided that we no longer have to kill other people whose religion differs from our own. No, we don’t have all the answers here, and we’re not perfect, but we try to do the right thing. It’s really not a bad place. Please join us.

Fox dropped the lawsuit!

Of course, they had to get in a parting shot: “‘It’s time to return Al Franken to the obscurity he’s normally accustomed to,’ a Fox spokeswoman later told CNN.”

Yeah yeah, whatever. Good show, Al!

Over on the Linktank, I linked the other day to the site for The Kabalarians, a group of…er…unorthodox thinkers who believe, among other things, that your name reveals your personality. While testing out the name analyzer at their site, I was shocked and disappointed to find that “Legomancer” wasn’t on their list of names! So I submitted it for their consideration, explaining that it was Zoroastrian in origin. Here is the result of their analysis:

Your name of Legomancer indicates qualities of a leader and organizer but a difficulty in concentrating and systematizing your efforts interferes with achieving your goals. You desire a good standard of living and the best quality in all your material possessions. You have a friendly nature, well-liked by others for your sense of humour and pleasant personality and you love parties and socializing in general. You could be musically or artistically inclined and may often be the “life” of the party and would enjoy finding expression in the entertainment field. You have a pleasure-loving nature, and although you have an ability to meet and mix with people on all levels, you tend to become involved in awkward emotional situations to your detriment. Deriving pleasure from giving to others, you enjoy spending money on them, but tend to be a spendthrift, and not build up a reserve for emergencies. You have a good appetite, and appreciate the best and richest foods. For this reason, you could possibly suffer with an over-heated bloodstream, which in turn affects the skin, causing rashes and eczema.

That’s just eerie! If it had only included the fact that I’m female, black, gay, and left-handed, it could have been 100% wrong! No natural force could be this inaccurate, could it?

First off, howls of derisive laughter to FOX News, for spectacularly failing at their attempt to stop the distribution of Al Franken’s Book, Lies, and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right. You can read about it here (it’s the NY Times, so use ’slashbot/slashbot’ to read it) but the gist of the article is that the Judge called the suit ridiculous and everyone laughed at FOX’s lawyers and their goofy arguments. Seriously.

One round of laughter was prompted when Judge Chin asked, “Do you think that the reasonable consumer, seeing the word `lies’ over Mr. O’Reilly’s face would believe Mr. O’Reilly is endorsing this book?”

The giggling continued as Dori Ann Hanswirth, a lawyer for Fox, replied, “To me, it’s quite ambiguous as to what the message is here.”

She continued, “It does not say `parody’ or `satire.’ ”

Ho ho! Those nutty nuts! Anyway, it’s not completely over yet, so I’m still ‘Fair and Balanced’ for a while.

One thing before we leave this article, though. I love how the Times describes Franken as, “writer and performer and an unabashed liberal.” Unabashed? How odd that Mr. Franken seems to not be embarrassed at all about his liberal views!

But on to items of far more substance. Let’s talk about the Environmental Protection Agency. Now, please bear with me, as for the rest of this article, I’m going to pretend like the EPA is not a pointless organization. Rest assured that I fully realize that the number one group the environment needs protection from is corporations, and since fish and trees can’t lobby or make huge campaign contributions, we know how that conflict will always turn out.

There’s the “news” that the EPA was pressured to lie about the air quality around the WTC attack site by the Bush administration. Can you believe it? The Bush administration getting people to lie to support its claims? (That was satire, FOX News.)

The second EPA story is this: Bush is planning to help the environment, by way of the EPA, through two proposals on the block, that you can read about here. (Warning: this source is non-American, so it may say shocking things about our country’s leaders that readers of the American press may not be used to.) As is standard operating procedure for this Administration, the Clean Air Act is being used to pollute the air and the Healthy Forests Initiative is going to expand logging rights. Since it’s not labeled “satire,” I can only assume the Bush truly does think that relaxing pollution controls makes the air cleaner.

(And just so I maintain my Fair and Balanced reputation, don’t think I’m unaware that Clinton’s environmental record was equally terrible.)

It’s been a busy week for Bush’s supporters. In addition to pretending that they care about the environment, they’ve also been sending a new piece of astroturf to newspaper editors around the country. If you’ve read a letter to the editor lately praising Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” program (you’d remember it - it would be the only text you’d ever read praising this act), then congratulations, your newspaper fell for it and printed scripted GOP Team Leader propaganda as a genuine citizen’s letter! Thankfully, the Springfield Republican didn’t fall for it. Looks like Bush Jr. is looking to be the same quality “Education president” ad Bush Sr. was.

And finally, although we now know that our attack on Iraq wasn’t about weapons of mass destruction, you must remember that when we find something suspicious, it suddenly WAS about WMDs. However, like the barrels of chemicals and the mobile vans, these pilotless drones have turned out to be not a smoking gun after all. Sorry guys. We’re back to the war being not about WMDs, but about making the world safe from terrorists.

Oops.

Holey Moley have we had a lot of visitors lately! The guest bedroom, while still needing a coat of paint, got set up and broken in by a bunch of our friends and family. The visitors, in order, were:

April and John. Since I was working, Becky mainly went sight-seeing with them, and they checked out the Gilette Castle and State Park, the Emily Dickinson homestead in Amherst (including Emily’s grave), dinosaur footprints in Holyoke, Edith Wharton’s homestead (”The Mount”) in the Berkshires, the Dr. Seuss statues here in Springfield, the Mark Twain house (not pictured), and a foggy Mount. Holyoke. Photos can be seen here. April and John also made a side trip to Boston, Concord, and Salem, places we hope to see ourselves soon!

Amy, Nigel, and Daniel stopped by for half a day next. We had breakfast at Memo’s in West Springfield, followed by a trip to the Seuss Memorial (rapidly becoming a favorite place to take visitors!). They were coming back from Northampton, and the nuptial ceremony of Beth and Mark! Congrats, folks!

My Dad then came to town, and we went all over the place with him! We revisited the Gilette Castle (I got to see it this time), we checked out bookstores in Northampton, Holyoke and environs, did the Seuss Memorial, stopped in the Yankee Candle Company, revisited Mount Holyoke (this time the fog had lifted and we could actually see things!) and then he and Becky went to the Magic Wings Butterfly House in Deerfield. You can see some photos of his visit here. We also enjoyed playing games, watching ‘Monk’ and generally visiting together.

No sooner had Dad flown back to Louisiana, when Anne and Sydney arrived! They got to see the Forest Park Zoo, the Seuss Memorial, and the Eric Carle Museum, and then went to Northampton to visit the newlyweds there. Photos of their experiences can be seen here.

Sydney spent a good deal of time playing with two small red potatoes and climbing the stairs. Anne relaxed with a martini and became the first guest to sample the exotic pleasures of the jacuzzi tub. (She also provided new bath accessories to enhance the tub experience!)

The very day Anne returned to Cincinnati, some of her fellow Ohioans, Jay and Zina, stopped by for lunch on their way to Boston. This was our first time meeting Zina, and since Zina loved the house, Becky loves Zina. (Zina is only an honorary Ohioan, incidentally, but she’s engaged to Jay, and that’s good enough for us.) For the record, we did not take them to the Seuss Memorial. We did, however, feed them bacon.

Whew! It’s so nice to be in a place where we really have a wide variety of things nearby to show people, and the space for them to stay comfortably while visiting. We enjoyed all of our guests and hope they had a good time as well.

A few notes on some comics books and comics creators. For those more interested in the political stuff, George Bush is a liar and a fraud.

So let’s talk about comics. One of the books I’m still getting is ‘Powers,’ which is written by Brian Bendis. It takes place in a world where superheroes (”Powers”) are the norm, but it deals with two cops who are regularly assigned to cases involving such Powers. The book is interesting and fun, but for a mature audience.

That being said, why is the audience apparently so immature? With each issue of cracking good story you also get a free transcript of a bunch of moronic pre-teens listening to a morning DJ and making fart and “homo” jokes. I refer to the letters page, where a seemingly endless supply of idiots show off their chops at being “crude” and “offensive” to amuse Bendis, who prints the result and responds in kind. I always tell myself not to read it, but it’s like a forty-car pileup, and afterwards I once again feel annoyed with myself for giving money to support this show. Do I find it “offensive”? No, just insulting to my intelligence. It’s like Bendis is saying, “Hi, thanks for reading my book, here’s what I think you’re like.” I suppose I could just buy the trade paperbacks as they come out and avoid the letters page altogether, but there’s already so many books I only buy in trades (Hellboy, Bone, Akiko) and it was nice actually getting a superhero book monthly.

Such attempts at calculated crudity are nothing new. Anyone remember ‘Preacher’? The comic that people loved because it was so violent and offensive? The one that, if you said you didn’t like it, it was because you were a prude who couldn’t “handle it”? It was written by Garth Ennis, who also took his brand of pointless excessive violence to ‘Hellblazer’ and totally tanked that comic. Or ‘Transmetropolitan’? That one actually had some interesting stuff in it, but it tired me out. Warren Ellis, the writer, who I generally like, has an unfortunate habit of not knowing when to step down a notch. If you keep the amp cranked up to 11 constantly, it becomes no different than keeping it at 2. It becomes boring, just manically boring.

Which brings us to Grant Morrison. Now, I have a soft spot for Grant. I first got into him when he was doing ‘Doom Patrol’ for DC. I went back and read his ‘Animal Man’ run and other stuff by him I could find (I’d kill to get the issues of ‘Doctor Who Magazine’ with his comics story in them!) His magnum opus was ‘The Invisibles’ which I thoroughly enjoyed, even if I didn’t always understand it. It was a rollicking good tale of conspiracy, sex, drugs, rock-n-roll, magic, and Armageddon. The cast was well-done. It was a riot and I was sorry to see it go.

When Grant returned with a mini-series called ‘The Filth’ that seemed to be more of the same, I was excited, but that quickly ended when I actually started reading it. ‘The Filth’ is kind of like the Invisibles, except with no likable characters and with everything filtered through one of those contributors to the ‘Powers’ lettercolumn. It’s hypersexed, nearly plotless, and just not at all fun for anyone who isn’t Grant Morrison. He once said he wanted ‘The Filth’ to come out with no writing credits so that no one would know he was doing it and be prejudiced because his name was on it. If it had, I would not have assumed that it was Grant Morrison, I would have assumed it was someone who wanted desperately to be Garth Ennis. I had no idea what happened until I read this interview with him. He’s a complete nutjob now, having totally bought into this rock-and-roll mysticism he writes about. Read the interview if you like, but it becomes nigh-incoherent along the way.

Which brings us to someone who does know how to do “mature comics”, and that’s Alan Moore, who is one of the greatest comics writers ever. (He wrote ‘Watchmen’, which helped revolutionize modern comics.) He’s currently writing a whole imprint called “America’s Best Comics” with titles like ‘Top Ten,’ ‘Tom Strong,’ ‘The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,’ and ‘Promethea,’ which are all excellent reads garnering critical praise. Well, that time is over. According to this interview, he’s retiring from mainstream comics. Unfortunately, the interview is vague about what that word, “mainstream,” means. If it means we’ll still get the same type of great stories, unique takes, and original ideas at a smaller company, no problem. I’ll follow him wherever he goes. If it means he’s abandoning comics of the mainstream type and going for his more non-mainstream stuff, then the comics world has lost a great deal. I’ve read a lot of this less-marketable stuff of his, and it’s also less-readable. Like Morrison, he’s into all this magick stuff that often means incoherent ‘mystical’ ramblings and ‘poetry’. Call me a philistine, but I’m just not interested. Either way, no more ‘Top Ten,’ no more ‘Tom Strong,’ or the others, except maybe for ‘The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,’ which it appears is owned by him instead of DC.

(And a side note to support Mr. Moore. DC, you have figured out what a gem you have on your hands with Alan Moore, as evidenced by your recent trade paperback collecting some of his finest DC work. Why can’t you just leave him alone and let him do what he does best?)

As long as I’m grousing about comics, let me steer people away from these two, even though they don’t deserve to be mentioned in the same html file as the above creators. ‘Shadows’ and ‘Mythstalkers’ are the books, both from Image. I got the first few issues of both, thinking that their central ‘team of people exploring the unknown’ might give me a good fix in-between Hellboy trade paperbacks, but dear god do these books suck. Awful writing, awful art, and utterly tired ideas.

So let’s end up on a positive note. Neil Gaiman, writer of ‘Sandman,’ has a new miniseries out called ‘1602′ which explores the idea of the Marvel Universe existing in that year. It’s fun, but hard for me to invest much into, since I really don’t care about the Marvel universe at all in any year. But Gaiman is a good one to stick with, and I’ve no doubt this ride will be interesting when it’s all done. He also has a great entry about the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund where he explains to some loon how wrong all these stupid conspiracy theories about the CBLDF (and the Jesus Castillo case I mentioned in a previous entry) actually are. It’s a good read, and he has a good blog.