Capt Tightpants doll coming in May from Tonner
“Tonner (a doll maker) has announced [a] Mal doll debut at their convention this May.”
http://whedonesque.com/comments/23274
From the source article: “Browncoats, Smugglers, Shepherds and Companions gather in a secret location from The Alliance to revel in the cult phenomenon known as ‘Firefly’. Joss Whedon’s blended science fiction and western sub cultures play into the highly original Fox Television Series and its subsequent Universal Pictures film ‘Serenity’. Robert Tonner invites you to his latest pop-culture partnership as he presents your very special Inara Serra souvenir and the debut of Malcolm Reynolds to the Tonner Character Figure™ family.”
I had to snark Sideshow over this.
“Not a question, just a big ‘I told you there was a viable market for Firefly!’ — Malcolm Reynolds, first of the Serenity crew, coming in May from Tonner. Sideshow still has a chance to redeem itself by going for the other hot Whedon property, Dr. Horrible. But it seems that your awareness of the fanbase begins and ends with Buffy. Why is that, Leon?”
Independent Publishers Group
“IPG operates its own order processing and shipping facilities. By keeping these essential functions in-house, IPG is able to offer unusually responsive customer service. Orders are, with rare exceptions, filled within 24 hours. Rush orders received in the morning are routinely shipped that same day, and afternoon orders are shipped the next working day.”
Yeah? Try more than five months. First contacted them Sept 1, 2009. Got a call from them 3 months later. 2 more months since they had everything they needed to ship the books, and still nothing.
Today I emailed, faxed, left a voice mail expressing my exasperation, and asked an assistant if there was “something going on” with the manager that could account for why he hasn’t fulfilled our order. She said he’s just busy in meetings, doing manager stuff. And she said she could see no record of our order.
I am enraged. Well, I would be if I was the kind to be enraged. Instead, I am perturbed. Angry that a person who calls himself a manager could be so callous. I’m just a sensitive soul trying to be nice. And getting NOWHERE with him, possible because of it.
Mmmm, psychic
In my dream: I tried to distract a female person from some possible nefariousness by standing right up close to her and projecting into her mind that she was standing in a field with a lovely rose hued sky. This did not work, but she did say “Mmmm, psychic,” as if impressed by my minor effort. She was one of those beautiful villain motifs, I guess.
Woke up feeling great though, in lust with life.
What lies beyond
Dreamed I was directed through a wrong door looking for the teachers’ lounge. Found myself in a surreal space of orgies. Two security people came up to me and demanded “Are you supposed to be here?”. I replied calmly, “I have two answers for that. One, Yes. Two, No, I went through the wrong door.”
They led me out, and an asian man who was some sort of leader of these people (much like the guy in season 7 of Lost) tried to give me some red jelly to eat, which I knew was a psycedellic that would confuse my memory of the event and thus help ensure that I would not be credible, and they would not be exposed. I declined it, spilled it on my sleeve and brushed it off.
I then made a defense of my ability to accept different people, saying I’d been with (met) different people and was better for it. He seemed to accept the possibility that I was perhaps wise enough to be trusted with what little information I’d learned about what lies beyond the teachers’ lounge. Apparently they were at risk of being attacked. Not clear on their situation.
I also dreamed I met myself, from 15 minutes earlier, a la Austin Powers, and the other me said I looked smaller in person.
“Experiment in Tera-bytes”!
Had no choice. Was paring back from being completely out of hard drive space for so long now. 2 TBs on the way! Irony is that will be the backup drive. My own drive will be my former backup drive – 750 GB. It will get me through a few more months. Problem is I’m starting to like lossless music. And it requires 2x to 3x as much room. Since I have about 300 GB of lossy music, that would be about 1 TB of lossless. So already, 750 GB is not enough. I’ll just have to start with only my favorite – and most sonically masterful – albums. And go very slowly, so I won’t run out of space until I can afford another 2 GB drive to be my main drive.
Craigslist
I got to buy a computer monitor on Craigslist for work today. Always fun to spend someone else’s money on something fun. It was just a cheap Sceptre monitor, an old one at that. But fun to buy.
Weird thing was, it had built in speakers. But there was no way to connect any audio to the monitor, so what were the speakers for? Who knows.
Austin TX
The statement written by the Austin Texas resident who flew a small plane into an IRS building is a remarkable read, for two reasons. First, because we are so rarely allowed an opportunity to read such a statement. Usually excerpts are all that are reported, or, we’re given what is supposedly a summary (such as “because they hate our freedoms”.)
The internet is to thank for this opportunity. He posted his explanation for his actions online. And though the FBI did ask for it to be taken down, it was saved and copied by many, including the document archive, The Smoking Gun.
The Smoking Gun: (read it and then come back)
The second reason it is a remarkable read is because it is not the statement of a loon.
I am not defending him by noting he was not a loon. I mean he was not a loon in that he weighed a decision to make a symbolic statement, aware that it would be akin to past revolutionary war type actions.
He was ultimately a damnable person for deciding that his statement was more important than any lives that may have been lost. But he wasn’t a nut – he was well aware that what he was doing was an act of insurrection.
His essay was an articulate and rationale defense of the middle class. His act of war was an act of war — and as such, indefensible morally. But his intention, of defending the middle class against exploitation, was admirable. That his intention was admirable, and his argument clear, does NOT make his act of war admirable. It was vile and wrong. And he will not be admired. But his argument was cogent.
“His point that big business does this [tax maneuvering] regularly, yet the little guy can’t is definitely valid,” noted a commenter on HuffPost. “But two wrongs don’t make a right. We should be fighting to make sure that corporations play by the same rules as the rest of us, rather than trying to play the games the way they do.”
Indeed. Unfortunately for everyone who worked in that building, he seemed to have concluded that there was no way to make that happen, not with elected officials who are openly bought by corporations. His actions were wrong. But was his belief wrong?
How can we reconcile that the man had a good point, yet acted reprehensibly? Perhaps by addressing his point, through governmental reform, so that acts as despicable as what he did will never be done again.
ADDENDUM: [A similar post I wrote, which may duplicate some of what I wrote above]
Without being political, I’d like to simply comment on the way some news outlets have described his essay. If you’ve read the essay, on The Smoking Gun website perhaps, then you’ve seen it for what it is — carefully composed and well written. And by that I mean the sentence structure is clear, the paragraph breaks correctly made, the argument carefully built, etc. From a storytelling point of view, he effectively provides a character arc when describing his life, and how it led him to his act of insurrection. All that can be said without agreeing or disagreeing with his thesis that the middle class is being exploited by the elite and left without any defense from the politicians who have been openly bought. It is simply a matter of objectively evaluating the writing and argumentative skills he brought to bear in his essay. Which brings me to my point about the media:
Some news outlets describe the essay as a “rant”, and some as “rambling”. Some as a “rambling rant”. Yet it was not!
Observing the media, expecting neutral reporting, I was surprised to see those exceptionally subjective words being used to describe what he wrote. It was almost as if reporters instinctively felt the need to recast the guy’s essay as the product of a madman, rather than consider it for what it was — an argument that appeared to be sound.
The New York Times was one of the very few papers to state that his argument was actually materially correct in many respects:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/19/us/19tax.html
That so many other outlets decided not to be impartial was a brush with how media must have been like in the USSR — semi-fictional and placating.
Some say we create a future that we are familiar with, so we will instinctively create an Orwellian future, even though we’ve all read “1984″ and got the point that it was bad. We’ll create it anyway, because it is at least familiar. This was an example of that sort of recasting of the facts that really, we should never do.
The only way to ensure that this sort of tragedy never happens again is to make sure that we attend to any of the problems that were pointed out, if any of the problems are real, and resolve them. The NY Times says they are real. So what happens next?
Well that wraps up my comments on this event. I just had that impression, about his essay and the news coverage last week, and thought it was worth noting. I am less interested in how every political camp is trying to suggest the guy must have been a this, or a that — always placing him exactly into whatever opposing side that camp already has. Progressives calling him a teabagger. Conservatives calling him a communist. All reading whatever they want into what he wrote, with barely any evidence to support their claims one way or another. He was apparently a liberal conservative capitalism communist, if everyone is to be believed. And that in itself makes it futile to even discuss politics about this case, even if we could.
Senator Boehner
The Republican minority leader, a tanning-bed aficionado named Boehner, was accused of being gay by someone on the internet. I’ve been considering the same question about him.
I don’t think he’s gay, he just likes lavender ties, which look effeminate.
But in this case, the feminine quality he projects is meant to convey that he is so very rich that he need never deign to do masculine labor.
It is the femininity of pampered nobility he is trying to project, not a femininity of wanting to be a bottom in a gay relationship.
Granted, since I am not gay I probably don’t have the best gaydar or deductive processes that an actual gay would have. But I’ve been puzzling over Senator Boehner’s apparent vanity for some time now — ever since I spotted him in his immaculately tailored suit and lavender tie during one of President Obama’s dynamic speeches.