Be Vewwy Quiet... According to the BBC, "Military commanders in Afghanistan have put a virtual news blackout on a coalition operation against suspected Taleban and al-Qaeda fighters in the eastern Paktia province."

Unqualified Offerings is going to go out on a limb here and say that the reason for the blackout is that "eastern Paktia province" actually means western Pakistan.

The Parent Trip: Choose Attainable Goals - Unqualified Offerings and Mrs. Offering have set the following standard for themselves: The goal is for the kids to reach the age of 18 without any member of the family appearing on local TV news.

The Parent Trip - Unqualified Offerings has a single innovation to its credit in the fatherhood endeavor, and offers it for general use.

Was a time when UO gave up the at-home dad dodge because the money ran out, and got a job 25 miles away, over the river and through the woods. The commute was about an hour in the morning and half again as long at night. It had been together with Offering Boy all day every day for all three and a half years of Offering Boy's life and didn't take the prospect of separation easily. So it found day care for the lad near its office, so that it could share two and a half hours locked in a car with a preschooler five days a week. Unqualified Offerings: bright about some things, dumb dumb DUMB about others.

But where was this site? Yes, time in the car with its son. For the purposes of this story, you need to know that, while UO obviously has a potty mouth, it does not swear in the car, and does not swear in front of its children. Hard as that may be to believe. Of Mrs. Offering's automolinguistics, this site can not speak. But somewhere, Offering Boy picked up the S-word.

And commenced using it with innocent delight one evening as the Offering Mobile neared the American Legion bridge. UO thought quickly.

"Son," Unqualified Offerings said calmly, with compassionate disappointment on the boy's behalf, "that word is only for people who have their driver's licenses."

"Oh," he said, as readily as he accepted learning that Wednesday always came after Tuesday.

And Unqualified Offerings swears that it has not heard the lad speak the S-word since.

(Occasionally, someone hearing this story offers the objection that, "But once he gets his license he's going to curse like a sailor." But really, by that point who gives a shit?)

A Fanboy's Very Preliminary Notes - Nobilis is out. The crummy local game store near my office got four copies for six reservations. Happily, I was the third reservation, and they've never seen me call them "the crummy local game store" on the internet. So I have a copy. Dang, it's beautiful. Since tonight was our night to actually play Nobilis, I haven't had a chance to read it yet. (Or compare it with the first edition, which is what we were playing with, you sharp-eyed questioner you.)

All We Are Saying / Is "Why a Duck? Why Not a Chicken?" - Sorry, Unqualified Offerings couldn't resist.

Irony and Its Uses - It's Istanblog Tuesday! His post on the foiled plot by Israeli extremists to blow up a Palestinian girls' school in East Jerusalem is not to be missed. Unqualified Offerings will quote extensively, out of a nagging worry that some of its readers may not yet have added Istanblog to their regular reading, like UO told them...

Of course the reaction of Palestinian sympathizers is, "see, the Israelis do it too." And the reaction of the Israeli sympathizers is "see, the Israeli police stopped them."

Although both sides will ignore the opposite argument, both would benefit from thinking about them. The Palestinians should note that the Israeli police actively prevented Israeli terrorists from blowing up hundreds of Palestinian schoolgirls. I'm not sure how many terrorist plots have been foiled by the Palestinian police, they mostly seem to arrest some people after the fact, after the international community puts pressure on Arafat.

Anti-Israelis might suggest that the Israelis did it to prevent bad PR. Israeli would lose a lot of international sympathy for their own fight on terror if they failed to prevent a horrific attack like this one. My response: that's 100% correct. And it works. The Palestinian leadership should take notes: If respect for human life isn't a compelling motivation for stopping suicide bombers, think of the PR benefits.

Pip Pip! - Istanblog has about two cheers for Jimmy Carter on his trip to Cuba, and a couple of jeers for Castro too.

I don't think Fidel is great. I'm a fan of democracy, free speech, and other human rights, which make it hard to dig the way Fidel runs the place. The appeal he holds for many is that he has, for fourty years, miraculously kept Cuba from being dominated by the US economically, politically, and even culturally. But it's a cowardly sort of victory, trading the confines of American imperialism for the confines of spiteful contrarianism.

I like Cuba and the Cuban people a lot. Havana is a late 1950's American city which was abandoned and squatted by vibrant, life-loving people. The place hasn't been fixed up since then, and the people that live there don't have very much in the way of material stuff, but they enjoy the hell out of life anyway.

Some people would say that's great, it's proof that Capitalism isn't the end-all be-all, and hope it stays that way. Part of me feels that way - I don't share the desire of many Cuban exiles in Florida to overwhelm Havana with McDonalds and condos, making it into a mirror of the Florida coast.

But it's kind of crappy for people in the West to say how nice it is for those Cubans that they are free from our materialistic society; they don't have the choice. We do have the choice, but very few of us opt to join the wondeful, materialism-free Cuban society.

Unqualified Offerings reminds its readers that Jimmy Carter destroyed the Soviet Union. Um, sort of.

Split-Screen Wahabism Watch - Ha'aretz reports that the Saudis are "putting on the pressure to stop suicide attacks," and maybe they are.

Information in Israel's possession suggests that Saudi foreign minister, Saud al-Faisel, applied massive pressure on Palestinian Authority minister, Nabil Sha'ath, during Friday's meeting of Arab foreign ministers in Cairo, in order to bring about an end to the suicide attacks that Saudi Arabia believes pose a threat to the fragile quiet of the past few days.

While Israeli sources say it is too early to know whether there have been direct meetings between Saudi officials and representatives of the two organizations, reports have reached Israel of "various types of [Saudi] pressure," aimed at kick-starting the diplomatic process.

It bears remembering that one of the participants in the meeting at the Red Sea resort of Sharm El Sheikh was the head of the Palestinian preventative security apparatus in the West Bank, Mohammed Dahlan. It is believed Saudi officials also entreated Dahlan to do his best to prevent terror attacks against Israeli civilian targets.

The authors also say that the Arabic-language Al-Quds Al-Aravi reports that Riyadh intends to summon Hamas and Islamic Jihad officials into the presence to try to get them to calm down.

Now here's the punch line:

Prince Saud denounced the charge that Saudi money encourages other Palestinians to become suicide bombers. "Does this money, when it goes to the families of the suicide bombers, tell another boy or girl, `Go kill yourselves, and we will give your family money?' This is ridiculous," said Prince Saud.

Hey, couldn't he be sincere? Couldn't the utter failure of Saudi Arabia to leverage the oil boom years into a diversified, modern economy be traceable to its rulers inability to understand how incentives work?

Remember, Unqualified Offerings asks the rhetorical questions, and you answer.

Elsewhere... Reader, old friend and lover of large fonts Dave Saia writes to announce the spring issue of his online magazine, moocat.net. The new issue features travelogs, a poem by Roger Kamenetz, haiku (can't be helped, I guess), the streaming audio piece "Cajuns on Fire," and in the archives: poems, haiku, travelogues and the correspondence of Dr. Klaww, supervillain and advice columnist. Check it out.

Pretty in Pink? - Eve Tushnet can't decide if "Chinatown" was a commie movie or not. Unqualified Offerings can't really remember, but most of the best hard-boiled detective novelists were political southpaws, and Chinatown was the best modern hardboiled detective movies. (Official Pronouncement: Harry O was the best hardboiled-detective TV series.)

Unqualified Offerings tracked down the essay of a fellow who would tell Eve she was right the first time, and that that's a good thing.

In the public service category, Eve points readers to the official Brothers Hernandez site. The brothers were responsible for legendary alternacomic Love and Rockets. Unqualified Offerings preferred Gilbert. But Jaime did The Death of Speedy, which was an uncompromising, moving tale of the 80s gang scene.

Meanwhile, Back in the Desert... - Pakistan resists US requests for large-scale military operations against al-Qaeda and Taliban concentrations in western Pakistan because 1) "We're busy fighting India over Kashmir" and 2) "You people don't know what you're talking about."

Point:

"We know where there is a large concentration of Al Qaeda," a Pentagon official said last week. But, he added, "Our guys haven't been getting the cooperation" requested from Pakistan.

Counterpoint:

"There can't be any such large-scale concentrations in any area of Pakistan," Brigadier Javed Iqbal Cheema, director of the Interior Ministry's crisis management group, said Friday. "It isn't possible."

Heh. Afghan guerillas using Pakistan as a sanctuary and base for cross-border operations. Really, what are the odds?

Renewed Prestige for Government in the Wake of Terror - Pesky Michael Isikoff at Newsweek reports that "FBI agent’s notes pointed to possible World Trade Center attack." Ahh. It's all a bit vague. For instance

Last week, in little-noticed testimony before a Senate panel, FBI Director Robert Mueller referred to another internal document that may prove more explosive: notes by a Minneapolis agent worrying that French Moroccan flight student Zacarias Moussaoui might be planning to “fly something into the World Trade Center.”

Thank heavens we have a globe-spanning intelligence network though:

Another sensitive issue: the CIA’s failure to aggressively follow up on information provided by Malaysian authorities in January 2000 about a meeting in Kuala Lumpur of Al Qaeda operatives—including two men who turned out to be among the 9-11 hijackers. Malaysian officials passed along photos to the United States, but they never heard back and stopped monitoring the suspects, one Malaysian official told NEWSWEEK. CIA officials said the significance of the meeting didn’t become clear until much later. But by the time the CIA alerted the FBI, it was too late.

Heads will roll, Unqualified Offerings tells you!

Okay, not.

Wilderness of Art Students - Ha'aretz picks up the 'Israeli art student' story. The article is not dispositive and doesn't seem to have much in the way of reporting in either direction. It's a meta-story, coverage of the coverage.

Hashemite Restoration W - Oh - King Abdullah of Jordan says Israeli policy is making fans for Osama bin Laden - "if he is alive."

Abdullah, whose late father, King Hussein, refused to join the U.S. coalition in the 1991 Gulf War, declined to say whose side he would take in the event of a new U.S. attack on Iraq.

No doubt some otherwise active bloggers who have professed admiration for the Jordanian Royal Family will be less active over the next couple of days, as they pause to reassess their enthusiasm for attacking Iraq and hitching US foreign policy to Bibi Netanyahu. Read a book or something while you wait.

Torn Between Two Lovers - Hawkish bloggers loved this Victor Davis Hanson piece about the psychological, moral and gastro-intestinal failings of Westerners critical of or hostile to Israel, and sympathetic to the Palestinians. Hawkish bloggers love Spinsanity. Spinsanity does not love the Victor Davis Hanson piece. Unqualified Offerings hopes everyone will be very happy together.

(Links via Ain't No Bad Dude and Antiwar.com.)

Joys of Capitalism, Continued - Moira Breen links to a story about a family that built its own roller coaster in the backyard. It has a twenty-foot drop and a loop. We are not talking about the idle rich here: the Ivers family built the thing in their own workshed. Rich they may be. Idle? No. The whole thing, story and coaster itself, stands as a tribute to our friend, the pursuit of happiness.

But it reminds Unqualified Offerings of a thought this site had at Deep Creek Lake this March. La Familia Offering stayed in the hotel of a ski resort (offseason). Offering Boy was struck by all the snow still on the mountain, and impressed when we showed him all the snow machines lined up in the parking lot, like propellers without their planes. So wouldn't a viable fad, come the next boom times, be renting a snow machine for your own backyard winter parties? Unqualified Offerings lives in one of many parts of the country where it gets cold, but rarely snowy. Being able to announce a "White Christmas Party" only at your house has a certain ostentatious appeal. This site wondered how available snow machines were for rent, and how much.

But wait! It's the 21st century, and as previously noted in this space, the 21st century kicks ass. Naturally, you can already buy your own snow-making machine for under $2,000. (The deluxe model is $3,000.) They'll rent too, but rates aren't given. The manufacturer notes that temperatures need to be under 25^oF to work. But it also notes that the machine has been "successfully adopted for snowmaking at refrigerated indoor amusement facilities internationally." So if the next boom is really big, just build a "winter wing" onto your mansion.

Mind you, Unqualified Offerings is a little worried that either home roller coasters or home blizzards will land you in Walter Olson Territory.

Spoiler Alert - Saw previews for the Scooby Doo movie. Scooby himself looks completely fake. Unqualified Offerings predicts that the story ends when Velma announces to the crowd, "This isn't a real dog. It's an animatronic construct...

Stray Thoughts on Spiderman and Spiderman, movie and character and comic. Took Mrs. Offering to see it tonight - her first time, the second for Unqualified Offerings - so impressions are fresh. Oh and before we get started: SPOILERS.

1. Worst misstep. The Danny Elfman title theme. This is actually one of the few places the movie goes wrong. The score is too Batman. The theme music needs to be jazzier, rockier, syncopated. The first Batman movie was done, shrewdly, as a kind of opera. But Spiderman was always about subverting Batman and Superman, and always about, among other things, the vitality of Manhattan life. The score needs to contribute to that. The 1990s cartoon series had better theme music. (Naturally, they took the original in techno directions, but it works.) Note: If the preceding link won't play in RealPlayer, highlight the link, click "Copy Shortcut" and paste it into Windows Media Player.

2. Built to Last - What's striking is just how little they had to do to the material to make a movie out of it. Peter's downwardly-mobile family life, the wrestling match for money, the nice kid who, when he gets a bit of power, becomes Not So Nice for awhile, the Geek's Revenge and Geek Apotheosis, is all original equipment. The rest is streamlining for the sake of letting the movie be a unified whole. Stan Lee and Steve Ditko did good.

3. The Hack's Apotheosis - It starts as Stan Lee's movie, but it ends as Gerry Conway's. Conway never got much respect as a writer (I hope). He wrote some of the worst issues of Justice League of America ever written in the early 1980s. But the end of the movie - and the end of the Green Goblin - is all Conway.

4. Things That Are Perfect - Tobey Maguire. Kirsten Dunst. Rosemary Harris. The costume. The webswinging. Much of the action. The voice-over intro.

5. Things That Are Nearly Perfect - Willem Dafoe. Cliff Robertson. The whole first half of the movie.

6. Against Continuity - Sure enough, there was a "continuity cop's" review of the film posted to the Elvis Costello mailing list within days of the premiere. I had doubted that there still were such people, the way the comics market has evolved. Silly me. For those who need an explanation, a "continuity cop" is someone who polices longstanding series like this for historical inconsistencies. They are not always fans. In a famous anecdote from the original Star Trek series, James Doohan spent ten minutes arguing with the week's director about the transporter panel: No, dammit, Doohan said, Scotty can't push the lever up to activate the transporter; you pull the lever down to activate the transporter! Doohan's point was not negligible - it just seemed that way. Comics fandom has never lacked for eager volunteers to spot such contradictions. This fellow decried the fact that the movie skipped "Peter's first girlfriend," Gwen Stacy, in favor of cutting straight to Mary Jane Watson. Had he been a real continuity cop he would have known that Betty Brant was Peter Parker's first girlfriend. Betty Brant is even in the movie. (She's J. Jonah Jameson's secretary.) He also felt that the movie should have had a half-dozen more Spidervillains in it.

Marvel actually built its dominance on continuity. It touted the interconnectedness of its characters and internal consistency of its storylines as a sign of its superiority to its main competitor, DC. Then Marvel discovered that it had been at this 30 years and it got really hard to explain how, say, middle-aged Tony Stark could have become Iron Man during the Vietnam War but was still feeling pretty fresh.

Continuity gives the fan a huge psychic boost - it makes comics seem like a more serious undertaking; makes the stories seem more real. It soldifies the world in which the stories take place, and reassures the fan, traditionally nervous about his hobby, that it's not just him that takes this stuff seriously - the creators do too.

But continuity comes with huge esthetic costs. Because whatever else superheroes are, they are first and always commercial properties. They are something companies sell, and the first priority is to preserve the future commercial viability of the property. This is why hardly anyone really dies in comics. Everything from costume to the hero's personality to the supporting cast exists to make a viable package. If the package is truly viable, it's not to be tampered with. Tampering only comes when sales slack off. DC let Frank Miller restart Batman, John Byrne revamp Superman and George Perez reconceive Wonder Woman only when those characters lost popularity. And you can be sure that whatever barnacles get scraped off the ship in the refitting will reattach themselves to the hull over time, because the barnacles are themselves trademarks. Supergirl is out? Supergirl will be back. Ace the Bathound doesn't fit the new, darker Batman? A way will be found to make him fit.

But the second thing Superheroes are is primal concepts - at least the best of them. As such, they are rich in implication. What IF Superman decided to solve all the world's problems for it? COULD Wonder Woman become so disillusioned with Man's World that she decided to return to Paradise Island forever? What if Daredevil dodged nineteen bullets, but not the twentieth, and died?Hell, what would Peter Parker's life be like at 40, or 60? You can't tell these stories within a consistent continuity because they remove the character from its designated market niche, or even leave the character with no further stories to tell.

Commercial comic book continuities resist closure. The greatest stories demand closure. That's a big esthetic fault line running through the medium. Indeed, the landmark superhero stories of the last 20 years have gone outside established Marvel and DC continuity to be great: The Dark Knight Returns; Watchmen; Kingdom Come and Earth X are at the top of most lists. All of them take place outside "real" continuity for the companies that published them. Neil Gaiman's Sandman theoretically exists within DC's main continuity, but Gaiman takes care to keep interaction with that continuity to a minimum.

Homer did not decide that this Achilles-versus-Hector thing was box office, so let's keep Hector around.

Which brings us, finally, to Spiderman and Spiderman. The Spiderman ethos needs to weave two disparate strands into the web of its appeal. One strand is Charlie Brown: the sad sack life of Peter Parker, who does his best, and does what's decent, and suffers for it.

It would totally suck to be that guy.

The other is the sheer acrobatic joy of being Spiderman - swingin', jumpin', kickin', quippin', doin' whatever a spider can.

It would totally rock to be that guy.

Oh the irony! as they say. The irony is the core of the character's appeal: neither The Pitiful Adventures of a Schlemiel nor The Happy Life of a Super-Acrobat would be as powerful as the combination. Spiderman the movie succeeds because its creators had the wit to realize this and fulfill the total character.

The problem Marvel-Age continuity creates is that, to keep Spiderman in his designated niche for as long as Marvel did, the reversals must reliably come - no matter how powerful Spiderman's body and how inventive Peter Parker's mind, things must happen, more or less on schedule, that will keep Peter broke and lonely and Spiderman misunderstood and unappreciated. That kind of stasis requires some....forceful manipulation, gods out of endless dreary machines. After awhile, you start to feel like the creators are jerking Spiderman around; then, that it's you, the reader, they're jerking. And you separate yourself from the comic book and character almost as an act of self-respect. Okay, that was me. But maybe it was you too.

The point is that a movie has the freedom to tell the Essential Story one time and be done with it. Even in the movie, the weakest link is the transition from Spiderman: Folk Hero to Spiderman: Despised Outlaw just because of some property damage to the Daily Bugle. But the core legend - Peter Parker blames himself for his uncle's death and decides that he must sacrifice his happiness to his duty - gets told, and even fulfilled, but not rehashed. Maybe the next two movies will rehash it. But rehashing twice beats rehashing 200 times. (Yes, Peter eventually got married and became sort of fulfilled personally. It was too late for me, though.) Comics that go outside the established continuity have the same freedom. Thus, in Earth X, Peter Parker's grown daughter gets to tell him, more or less, to stop feeling sorry for himself.

7. Mary Jane and Globocop. Lord of the Rings was a movie (and a story) to warm the hearts of libertarians and paleoconservatives. Its highest good is the abnegation of power. Spiderman is a movie (and a comic) to warm the hearts of liberals. Its highest good is employing power for the sake of others. Over on Letter From Gotham, Diana Moon wrote "The best movie superhero ever is Humphrey Bogart as Rick, in Casablanca." I don't know if Diana had seen Spiderman at the time she wrote that, but in some ways, it and Casablanca are the same movie. Rick and Peter both send their true love packing: they have duties. The problems of Peter Parker don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. You're not supposed to say it, but Casablanca was a, well, a commie movie. (A great commie movie, mind you.) It's not just well-made anti-nazi propaganda; it's well-made Popular Front propaganda. The needs of the Collective trump the needs of the individual, or the couple. Another irony of Spiderman is that he does his duty to the Collective in such solitary, anarchic fashion.

It's all about self-sacrifice and altruism. It must drive Objectivists crazy - at least the ones who don't argue, tautologically, that if Peter Parker chooses to live his life this way it must be because he derives the maximum possible satisfaction from doing so and thus is "selfish" after all. (Ironically, Spiderman co-creator Steve Ditko became heavily influenced by Ayn Rand in his later work. This sympathetic account of his Objectivist influence is worth reading.)