A Fanboy's Media Notes Saw the next two episodes of Spider-man on MTV tonight. In general, they lacked the odd false notes of last week's episodes. The CGI method is still alternately intriguing and disconcerting - in noncombat situations, they often have people moving so slowly you expect Submariner to come swimming into the frame. Then they crank the speed for the action sequences. That said, the cartoon now gets the Unqualified Offerings seal of approval, and I recommend you devote an hour of your week to it, unless you skip all the Fanboy's Notes items. First run of new episodes is Friday at 10 and 10:30PM. You can see all air dates/times at the MTV schedule page.

Speaking of comics and media, Dirk Deppey has updated his Marvel Movie Doomsday theory to incorporate the modified flop of the Hulk movie. I don't know the financials the way Dirk does, but my question is: absent the debt load and the Chapter 11 proceedings, hasn't Marvel simply become DC? Meaning, didn't DC Comics pioneer living off licensing starting in the 1960s. For almost twenty years between the late sixties and mid-eighties, their books sold relatively poorly, and Batman, Wonder Woman and Superman sold incredibly poorly. But Batman, Wonder Woman and Superman underoos and keychains were everywhere. There was a Wonder Woman TV show and several Superman movies and various Saturday morning cartoons. I have to believe that, until Teen Titans came along, DC's major revenue stream was licensing too.

So on the one hand, I'd argue that even if the movie deals dry up, Marvel needn't kiss its merchandising stream goodbye - and I mean general-public merchandising here, not Direct Market sculpture deals. T-shirts, PJs, Halloween costumes, gum wrappers, cereals and so on. They've finally succeeded in planting a handful of their characters as firmly in the mass mind as DC's Big Three. On the other hand, a diminution in actual movie deal revenue would surely still devastate. On any spare hand, though, just how permanent need this sudden aversion to superhero licenses be in Hollywood. Spiderman 2 will get made, as will Punisher. (I will be amazed if the Punisher movie has much success. Call me a cynic.) It's not mentioned in the article Dirk quotes, but surely the third X-Men movie has or will get the nod too, no? X2 made big big bucks. Hulk will probably still earn out once video and foreign revenues come in. And if two of the next three movies (Spidey, Punisher and X3) succeed, changeable Hollywood opens its checkbook again.

On the fourth and final hand, DC in its ebb tide phase ended up in the deep pockets of Warner Brothers, which is about as far from being in bankruptcy court as you can get, so the two situations aren't exactly commensurate.

Hey, it could all happen the way Dirk says it could happen.

Where Are They Now? the brigades of your army. StrategyPage has a table with explanatory text:

The rule of thumb is it takes three divisions to support one in the field:

o One division training/deploying,
o One division in the field, and
o One returning/recovering.

If the Army is to sustain is current deployment level, it needs 15 Divisions, just to maintain the status quo in Iraq.

In addition, the Army has at least a brigade in Afghanistan (requiring another division to sustain), 1 or 2 in the Balkans, requiring 3 – 6, and the 2nd Division in Korea, generating a force requirement for 20 – 24 divisions.

The Army has 10 active divisions, 8 Army National Guard Divisions for a total of 18 Divisions and there is a shortfall of 2 – 6 divisions. Separate brigades (the active army has 5 [3 of which are deployed] and the Army National Guard has 18) can certainly be used to make up the difference. This would require a large-scale mobilization of the ARNG and Army Reserve and would damage the ability of these units to support the Homeland Security Mission.

Thanks to friend, poet, novelist and UO reader Michael Schaffner for the link.

Fvck Yov poems, an entire anthology edited by Mr. Establishment: David Lehman. Some are just bitchy. Some are too reflexive, of the "This is my fuck you poem, a poem about . . . " variety. But some are quite enjoyable. Link courtesy of Michael Croft.

Habeas Corpses - Fallout from the deaths of Uday and Qusai. Salam says reports of Iraqi doubts are real and the American occupation authorities "have fucked up again by first making the decision to kill the idiots and then not give us clear proof of their death."

Some people remarked that the pictures of the bodies didn't look much like U & Q. That part doesn't surprise me. As I learned the one time I had to identify a body, a photograph of a dead person looks nothing like the same person, alive. (But I got a poem out of it.) But reports of pretty standard postmortem reconstruction surgery (prettying up the corpse, basically) are only going to hurt. Though you'd think reports of Fedayeen vowing revenge for the brothers' deaths would have to count in any local "Are they really dead" arguments.

The question of killing rather than capturing comes into play here, but we'll come back to it.

Pass Out the Cigars - Though once a relatively popular blogger, I only ever had one official blogchild, which made me feel sort of wistful when I thought about it. But I'm proud to announce an unofficial blogchild and commend - no, command - it to your attention: the Homerically-named Polytropos: A Blog of Twists and Turns.

Proprietor Nate Bruinooge is my friend and gaming buddy and, like Odysseus, a man of twists and turns himself. How many ABDs in American Lit do you know of who were once the top-ranked Middle Earth collectible card game player in the United States? Nate is a terrific writer. He expects to cover culture more than politics, and he's well-suited to it. He writes superbly, and he already has some excellent material on his site. As a fellow admirer of A.S. Byatt, I thought his dismantling of Byatt's imprecation against the Harry Potter books struck just the right tone, and benefitted from his unique perspective:

But I will give her Quidditch. Never liked it much myself, mainly because, compared to the many other magical analogues to things in the Muggle world, this one seemed sloppy. And 150 freakin' points for catching the Quaffle -- come on! With that much at stake, a smart team would forget about scoring goals and devote all their energy to supporting their Seeker. But I digress.

His item on Liberia, whose political conclusions I disagree with, benefits from the personal perspective - he used to live there.

Think of it as a liberal God of the Machine or Two Blowhards. A heterosexual geekboy Fresh Bilge - whatever. But get in on the Polytropos action now.

A Fanboy's PSA - Trends are clear. It's officially time to add Eve Tushnet to all the "semi-comics blogger" lists out there. Linking to SequentialTart, rhapsodizing about Alias and today, panning the Hulk movie at length, and that's a few days output.

Also, as Dirk Deppey notes, UO O.G. Justin Slotman has a bunch of interesting comics-related items tucked among all his basketball pieces. How come I missed them? Probably still punishing him for taking off from blogging the entire summer of 2002 without any #@%&#($# announcement or anything! Anyway, one of his items takes up a throwaway line of mine about Daredevil. He uses it to praise the Ann Nocenti-John Romita Jr. era of the book. I missed it first time around, but synergistic Marvel reissued a collection to tacitly tie in with the reappearance of Nocenti-era villain Typhoid Mary in the current book's storyline. I started reading it in Borders the other week. I'll try it again, bolstered by Justin's praise. But it seemed to me that Nocenti couldn't write for shit.

UPDATE: It is the official opinion of this website that Typhoid Mary looks hotter in Alex Maleev's Jamie Lee Curtis-based rendition.

Indian Wars - Here in DC, US District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly "said yesterday she is moving to resolve a long-running dispute over whether the team name and logo for the Washington Redskins are insulting to Native Americans, a ruling that could affect millions of dollars in sales of Redskins paraphernalia," according to the Washington Post. The suit pits a group of seven Native American activists against the team owners. In 1999, the patent office ruled, at the activists' request, that the team's trademark violated "a 1946 federal law that prohibits the government from registering a trademark that disparages any race, religion or other group."

I'm on the team's side here. One argument I hear, mostly from white liberal columnists and radio personalities, is "Do you think it would be okay if someone named their team the [N-Word]s? What about the [K-Word]s?" The argument is meant to shock you to your senses, but the shock value cuts against the critics of the Redskins name (and by extension other Indian names).

If anyone ever has named a team "the [N-Word]s" it hasn't come up in the years of debate I've seen about team names, hasn't shown up in sports histories I've read or watched. I confess that I'm not sure how to structure a Google search that would answer the question without drowning the results window in filth. Nor do I know of any teams named the Sambos, J;g@boos, Spooks, Darkies or Colored.

Well, why not? Because those names are insulting, and this country has had a long, baleful history of racism in which white people, who tend to be the people who own sports franchises, didn't much like black people. If you named a team the [see bad word list in previous paragraph] you would, if you were a racist, be naming your team for something you despise; if you were not a racist, you would be insulting your own sensibilities, and the people (non-racists) you'd instinctively want supporting your team. Either way, you'd be applying a sobriquet to your team with strongly negative associations.

And people just don't do that. People choose team for their admirable associations. Nobody names their teams the Doofuses, the Rejects or the Grifters either. That no one names teams after slang terms for African-Americans, and many people have given teams familiar names for America's tribal peoples, tells us a number of things all by itself:

o White America's historical anti-black racism has been deeper than its anti-Indian racism
o The tropes white Americans bind up in Native American names are "long ago and far away" tropes - "Redskins" and "Chiefs" have no more to do with contemporary Indian life than "Vikings" with the ethos of present-day Scandinavia.
o Those tropes are also clearly positive, chiefly bravery and hardihood. Even the violent associations occur in a context, sports, where a certain level of violence is valorized (hence Raiders, Buccaneers etc.).

Now volumes could and have been written about the ethics of admiring another people after you've safely dispossessed them. And the (to me obvious) fact that Redskins and other names are not intended to denigrate doesn't lessen the various degrees of offense that are and are not taken by different actual Native Americans. Nor does it speak to the alienation the name can cause among some liberals of whatever race.

But the trademark law, as described by the Post, focuses on the intent side of the insulting-aggrieved relationship. "Disparage" is an active verb that requires a subject. The only plausible subjects here clearly can not intend disparagement - that would be bad for business.

Asides: 1. Redskin team founder George Preston Marshall was either an anti-black racist or a cynical racial opportunist. He marketed the Redskins as "the team of the South" in the days before the Atlanta Falcons and Miami Dolphins, let alone the Carolina Panthers and Tennessee Titans - the white South. Marshall was the last modern-era NFL owner to sign a black player. Finally he got sick of losing and traded for Bobby Mitchell. Mitchell recalls an early training camp supper where the whole team broke into a post-prandial rendition of "Dixie." George Preston Marshall avoided every possible association between his team and all things African-American for as long as possible. That was good, sad to say, for business. That such a clear-eyed racial calculator cleaved to Native American names (the Redskins started life as the Boston Braves) says everything there is to say about the disparagement value of such names.

2. Maasai. Zulu. Kikuyu. These would be good team names. Now. I suspect we're not actually far off from the day when the right sort of owner figures the hip-hop spelling "Niggaz" will give his franchise just the street cred edge he needs for merchandising purposes.

3. Even some activists have suggested that they could accept replacing the "generic" Indian names (Chiefs, Braves, Redskins et al) with tribal names. That can work for people in Cheyenne or Apache country. I don't see the Washington Pamunkey throwing much fear into people. The Washington Powhatans (POW-ha-TANS) has its stresses in all the wrong places. That plosive kicks off the name nicely, but the semivowels at the turn of the first syllable let all the vigor out of the name. Shawnee might not be bad. It's a tribe people have heard of. The Washington Piscataways has promise - opponents spend their time figuring out who the Piscataway were instead of studying film.

Timing Problems - I need to get back to blogging in the mornings. I had a few things I wanted to write about when I got up. Damned if I can remember what they are now.

Fat Suits - Kevin O'Reilly, who says he likes Unqualified Offerings "in spite of the fitness items" is following the pathetic class action suits against the fast food industry, which I, um, covered weeks ago in a couple of fitness items. Hey, his coverage is still excellent, and his blog has a nice design. Go here and here. Sharp responses to lousy reasoning.

More Exceptions to the John Donne Principle - Looks like one of these "we really think we got him/thems" panned out. Uday and Qusai Hussein have bought it, diminishething no one.

"We're certain that Uday and Qusay were killed," Sanchez said. "We've used multiple sources to identify the individuals."

as quoted by Walter Pincus and Dana Priest in the Washington Post. See? I told you it was worth leaving enough body to identify.

The White House took a break from issuing an unending stream of nonsense to toss in a true statement:

Over the period of many years, these two individuals were responsible for countless atrocities committed against the Iraqi people and they can no longer cast a shadow of hate on Iraq.

Matt Hogan e-mails me that "I guess there's always a silver lining on the dark cloud of wacko ideological war." Tacitus is beside himself with glee not just at the deaths of the Terrible Two, but at reports of Iraqi celebrations. But I'd keep in mind this Peter David musing from earlier this morning, in which he explains what a trip he took to Romania has to do with the situation in Iraq:

Wherever we would go, guides would say, "And this was a palace Ceausescu was building before we overthrew him." "And this was where Ceausescu's favorites were housed before we overthrew him." The fact that they had taken charge of their lives and tossed out a parasite--a parasite the U.S. had supported until the mid 1980s, by the way--was a source of great national pride.

The Iraqis have no national pride. They're the United States' bitch. To seize control of your destiny engenders pride. To have someone do it for you and then not leave causes frustration, self-loathing, and anger directed at your intended liberators.

Which I predict will remain true, when the excitement dies down.

A Fanboy's Blogwatch - Via Franklin Harris, this article about all the exclusive deals DC Comics is signing with A-list creators. Interesting. I realized a few weeks ago that, despite my longstanding antipathy toward Marvel Comics, which dates from the piratical 1980s, that they've had the edge in quality over DC when it comes to superhero comics lately. I haven't read a DC book as good as Daredevil or New X-men, though I confess to not looking all that hard. I'm not buying every title each month and doing a comprehensive comparison. However. It looks like DC has locked up most of Marvel's best writers except for Brian Michael Bendis. I'm unlikely to keep buying Wolverine after Greg Rucka leaves, or New X-men in the absence of Morrison. I can't stand X-books generally - I had to buy them for the jobs these creators were doing.

Eve Tushnet praises Alias.

Dirk Deppey of Journalista is back from San Diego Comicon and blogging at normal length. Interesting find in today's links: the Miami Herald on comics writers who made the jump to television. Actually a couple of the writers discussed started in television and then added comics work. The article generously theorizes that "comics and filmed entertainment require dynamic storytelling and scripters who think -- and write -- visually" and not comics and film both value hacks whose major talent is dancing to the tune of their insane bosses.

On the sheerly exciting if more than a week old news front, Dark Horse Comics officially announced that they will "publish a quarterly comic anthology called "Michael Chabon Presents…The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist." Comic Book Resources has a detailed report.. The quarterly issues will be 80 pages long and debut in December.

Bill Sherman has a review of the new Spider-man animated series from MTV that I pretty much wholly endorse, in general and in detail. Generally a good series with puzzling lapses, at least in the episodes that Bill and I saw. Frex, on viewing the Lizard's - aka Professor Connors, Peter's boss and mentor - apparent demise, Spiderman tosses off a quip that seemed thuddingly wrong in tone, given that he knows who the Lizard is and apparently has some affection for him.

Reading Around - Feeling . . . so . . . lazy . . . still. And they're still not running the country the way I want. Bastards. Anyway, stuff to read . . .

God of the Machine - Aaron Haspel is on a blogger inside baseball kick, with notes toward a Devil's Dictionary and an entry on the ethics and politics of the blogroll. Also, Snitches: why do we think they suck?

The Light of Reason - Arthur Silber explains why patriotic Americans of good will might not "hope for a successful occupation of Iraq." He takes off from an aspect of a recent Tacitus post that I left aside when citing the post as a whole. Arthur has been writing a lot about what he calls, after Rand, the "New Fascism." Before anyone dismisses the "political F-bomb" as crazy talk, note the word "New" and ask how likely it was that an ideology that suffered such famous reverses in the middle of the last century would not evolve into a more survivable form? Also, pretty much the last word on the "I-word" too.

Counterspin - Hesiod goes way beyond masturbation in a grand summary of the surprising news about your health. Not as gruesome as it sounds.

Body and Soul - any number of cracklin' items this week so far, including a pithy item about what we might call "tabloid intelligence."

UPDATE: Eve Tushnet - has had another of her miraculous outbursts of post production. Just start at the top and keep reading.

Weekly Fitness Blog Item - 168 pounds, "waist" 34.5" let out. Losin' weight without weed, eating sunflower seed. Mind you, I gained weight without weed too - drugs bulk large in my political life, but not at all in my personal life. Ate a lot of sunflower seeds last week, though.

Never did quite go back on Atkins induction, but I stuck with fruit over vegetables for half the week. Enough food talk.

Exercise: I "ran" this morning with no weights at all, partly, like Magneto making the nonmagnetic spaceship, just to prove I could do it. It was actually about 1/3 running, 2/3 walking over a 2.6 mile course at about a 12-minute mile pace. Running is hard! but it still felt like a bit of a waste, doing nothing with your hands except holding the leash of Unqualified Dog. Changed up weight-training protocols this week and got a bit off-schedule. I'm trying the two-sessions a week thing, one upper body and one lower body. Didn't get around to the arm session until last night, which is the rest of the reason I ran with no weights this morning.

Consumer Reports this month helpfully defines your waist as falling exactly halfway between your bottom rib and the top of your hip. If it's good enough for Consumer Reports it's good enough for me. The article, available online only for subscribers, talked about health risks from abdominal fat, as opposed to less dangerous thigh and behind fat. There is current thinking that waist size is a better indicator than Body Mass Index of risk for heart disease, diabetes and breast cancer. The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute says risk increases for women with waists of 35" and men with waists of 40". The obesity research center at Columbia University says risk actually starts to go up (more slowly) at 33" female and 35" male waistlines. I haven't inspected the studies and probably wouldn't be qualified to pass judgment on them if I had, so file under FWIW.

In other fitness blog news, Jeremy Scharlack tries to make his own low-carb chocolate. He's had a slight uptick in weight but shouldn't worry. Happens to all of us.

Avram Grumer has switched to the Body-for-Life exercise program. It's becoming something of a trend. Reading his recent items has grudgingly increased my respect for gyms. It was clear that he was maxing out what his 21-pound sportblocks could do for him. Not everyone, though, can either afford the next size up in Powerblocks - I sure can't - or has room to litter their place with every set of dumbbells they might need. Gyms may be particularly good for people in the city: Avram noted last week that it had gotten too hot to do Heavyhands outside. I do mine before work along a leafy course, but I don't live in Manhattan. Even working out indoors can be a problem if you live in an apartment. In the mid-80s when I tried Heavyhanding during the middle of the day, the people downstairs kept complaining to the property manager. I ended up working out on the balcony a lot.

So, Gyms: maybe not completely pointless, is my new official conclusion.

Note: if you run fitness items and you're kind of cheesed that I only ever link to Avram and Jeremy, I probably just haven't discovered you - even if you've linked to me, my referrer stats aren't that great on this host. So drop me a line.

Fantastic Grow the Evening Gowns - The weather is so nice I just can't, as the Brits say, get arsed about the state of the world. It's been a newsy couple of days, too - those nonexistent weapons of whatever that don't matter may have encouraged the British government to start killing British citizens (I believe the standard theory holds that people form governments to protect themselves from being killed - note to self: maybe this doesn't work so good?), while here in America it appears that high officials of the federal government have either committed the felony of revealing the name of a US intelligence officer or perpetrated a tortious smear against a woman for the crime of being married to an inconvenient critic. But understand the nuances here: "felony" and "tortious smear" apply only if it's you or me doing these things, loyal reader. In case you've forgotten, there's one set of rules for us and another set for them.

But rather than write about this all weekend, I've been watching cartoons and movies and exercising - cultivating my quadriceps if not my garden. See important items on the Plame case by Mark Kleiman (here and here) and Kevin Drum.

Also, when I signed onto MSNBC this morning, I saw the headline "Two More US Troops Killed in Iraq," but such headlines are such a constant now that I'm never sure when it's new soldiers being killed and when it's just been held over from the previous day.