I Download, Therefore I am...an Emmy Voter

The term For Your Consideration (FYC) is a familiar mantra during this time of year for those of us who are voting members of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (some 14,000 plus). The Emmy nominating process is in full swing, all of which culminates Sunday night September 13 on CBS with the Prime Time Emmy Show. Other networks think so highly of this star-studded program extolling the excellence of the television world that they can't wait to counterprogram against it.

Right now, our home floors and office desks should be piled high with DVD screeners. Production companies, cable and broadcast networks, and, in some rare instances, select individuals should be inundating our mailboxes with DVDs of selected series episodes or one time only specials,in order to remind those of us in the business about the past year’s worth of brilliant television and how much of it we missed by doing silly things like getting out of the house.

I’ve been watching television for so long that I still use rabbit ears to clean loose scrapes of food from under my refrigerator. With the advent of all digital programming this month, rabbit ears joins 8-tracks, the Edsel and collegiate political discussions as things of the past. I will miss my little buddy. I hope he tastes good.

In the old days, three networks and the NET (forerunner of PBS) were all we fanatics had at our disposal. Just like the new car lines, all major programming premiered in the Fall. We rearranged our lives for the new season so we could laugh and cry and fail to do our homework; some of us even penned love letters to our favorite stars. Emily Dickinson, who spent very little time watching dramas (preferring sit-coms that better resembled her own life), went school girl nasty over David Janssen; she said it best after the premiere of the 1964 Quinn Martin series, The Fugitive:

Wild Nights

Wild nights. Wild nights!
Were I with thee,
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile the winds
To a heart in port
Done with the compass
Done with the chart.

Rowing in Eden.
Ah, the sea.
Might I but moor
Tonight with thee!

Intelligent design scientists were still years away from inventing recording devices. We either watched at the prescribed time or found ourselves watching missed episodes during the dog days of summer. Those of us who stayed indoors to watch a summer replacement variety show like Dean Martin now have engrossing stories to tell our grandchildren.

With the introduction of the consumer VCR beginning in the late 70s, viewing habits became far more malleable; we regained our bi-pedal mobility and actually saw sunlight from beyond our windows. No longer constrained by obdurate network schedulers, we could tape a show, leave our apartments for food or even attempt a date; yet we were comforted by the knowledge that, upon return, our episode would be waiting. Life truly had become more gooder.

It took some time, but by the late 1980's eligible Academy voters began receiving VHS copies of the just concluded season through the mail. The Academy was forced to go late 20th Century because it was finding it more and more difficult to coax enough volunteers away from tennis or golf weekends to hype their own occupation: The old way of casting ballots was just too medieval.

I love show business with the same fervor as I love stalking celebrities, but even my ardor was tested mightily with the old methodology. The Manhattan Project had far less security than this ballot process. Driving into Beverly Hills gang territory to vote in your appropriate categories was both nerve-wracking and time consuming.




Volunteers would be forced to spend whole weekends sequestered away in various NORAD-like buildings around the country, sifting and winnowing through the previous year's shows for the top five contenders. They couldn't discuss what they saw or how they voted. In fact, they weren't even allowed to acknowledge their spouses if they were in the same room together...much as it is at any Hollywood soirée. After one of these behind closed doors, windowless room, stale donuts and cold coffee experiences, methadone withdrawal was never feared again.

Life is all about flat-line simplification and stupifying stuff down. I want it delivered to my door and easy to start. Why induce unnecessary anxiety levels by purchasing a piece of technology so complicated that Einstein would need to text message Niels Bohr for help in putting it together? Who needs the aggravation? A cottage industry has arisen over the last twenty years in publishing extolling the virtues of making everything non-threatening, push button simple. In fact right now I'm looking at my copy of Breathing for Dyslexics. I thought I was purchasing Breeding for Dyslexics, but I digress.

Mailing scores of VHS tapes cluttered up dens and second bathrooms all over the country, but life became so much easier for us. We could now participate in the elective process with only our ass muscles, leaving the rest of our bodies reposed for high intensity yoga, Pilates, and diet flushes. Since it was no longer necessary to drive to any fortified luxurious locations, the average John and Jane Q Emmy voter could kick back and view missed episodes the way they were intended to be watched--- in your underwear, while making dinner, showering or playing poker. Hopefully the VCR was connected to a television.

VHS begat DVD and the goodies just kept coming. We’d receive scores of disks, each with a representative sample of episodes. Some years the packaging housing the DVD's was more creative than the shows within. After the voting season was over, we dumped them off the Catalina shoreline, gave them to friends to sell on the black market, or used them for skeet practice. Those voters who were really conscientious returned the discs to the Academy, where they were recycled off to our servicemen around the world. The troops in Iraq, no doubt, couldn’t wait to get their hands on copies of Generation Kill.

This year, my floors merely have last month's pizza cartons and old nachos chips from New Year's 2007 littering them. Due to the economic downturn, going green, and the success of the Internet tubes, this season's hard copy DVD giveaway failed to materialize. The years of episodic swag are coming to an end. Some of the majors are still sending DVDs through the mails (HBO, History Channel, Universal, USA, for instance), but most are saving $$$ by directing us to the Prime Time Emmy site. So much for skeet shooting and illegal dumping this year.

Instead of watching episodes for consideration on HD or plasma screens the size of a network executive's ego, we voters can now gather around the comfort of a large computer monitor to mark our selections on a downloaded Emmy ballot. Just what I crave after spending twenty hours a day in front of a computer screen looking for work, watching YouTube, befriending people on Facebook, or downloading the latest yoga positions from certain Eastern European web sites. My retinas already have carpal tunnel. Judging the highest quality of television programming this way is like eating tiramisu through a straw.

Damn progress, but if this be the wave of the future, damn progress again. I have four television sets, two set up with DVR capability. I'll hunt through the weekly listings for missed episodes with the obsession of an out-of-work print journalist looking for a solvent newspaper rather than watch prime time shows online. If I need both Viagra and that restless leg syndrome pill to get me through all-nighter view-a thons, then so be it. What else does the Academy want from me?

Gamers tell me there are cables and pulleys and doo-dads available to connect computers to television screens. I could download a show and, magically, watch it on my 12" black and white Emerson if I was of the right mind. Well, I am of the wrong mind. Right now that's a no go. If I have any more wires and attachments coming out of my wall sockets, I'll need to pay for a live-in fire inspector.

Before tackling this season's product, I'm reminded that some Emmy obligations from previous seasons still need my attention. I wonder if it's too late to forward ballots for the final season of X-Files or Season Two of 24?

He Never Left Omaha Beach

I remember his name being Wendell. He was tall, not basketball player tall, but the height I hoped to one day grow to. His face was already alcoholic lined and so many pockmarks, the sort caused by teen age acne left ignored by ignorance or cost. His eyes were a series of black circles matching the flecks of dirt that all but fell out of his ears. His teeth were a hard dark yellow even though he was still technically a young man. His hair was cut Army short, though there was hardly any left.

He had a noticeable scar over his right eye. The tip of his left middle finger was missing. Both happened, he said, after the war: the first in a bar fight; the second, a farming accident. The man was a mess.

He sat alone by the water’s edge, not mumbling to himself or flailing away at imaginary combatants like so many of the other performers in Brittingham Park. He simply sat there, occasionally tossing out a pebble, staring straight ahead out towards the far shores of the lake. He smoked one Lucky Strike after another.

He’d take a couple of quick puffs, then leave the cigarette dangling from his lips before hitting it for one last drag. He’d flick it into Monona, watch as it bobbed around in the water until the waves brought it back to shore. He would pick up the soggy butt and bury it into the grass in some odd formation only of his understanding. Seconds later, he would check in his pocket for the pack and light the next one up. One afternoon he smoked his way through two packs, leaving forty cigarettes face down in neat rows along the shoreline before walking out of the park. He left none in the water.

Wendell spoke softly perhaps embarrassed by his high pitched voice. He was in his early 30s, but since the war he felt older than his grandfather. I don’t know how we started talking, me an eight-year old and him old enough to be my father. Times were different back then. I lived two blocks away from the park and never thought once about worrying about my safety. I don’t remember ever being told not to talk to strangers as long as they weren’t too odd looking or too drunk.

Perhaps I wanted to bum a cigarette. My mom still smoked at the time; my dad stopped after his first coronary almost dropped him dead in front of us. Cigarettes were not part of my diet at home. Right now I wasn’t at home.

Everybody’s Wendell’s age had fought in the war. Not the Korean War which no one talked about even back then, but World War II. My dad had fought in Europe, but he never spoke of it. No matter how many times I asked what life was like in a prisoner of war camp, he came back with another story about how great life was in America. He told me to learn about the war from reading books or speaking to someone else.

Wendell never gave me my first Lucky Strikes. He said I should wait until I was ten like he did. He grew up a couple of towns over from Jesse James's farm, but spent his summers with an uncle living like Tom Sawyer near Hannibal. I knew who Jesse James was from television; a couple of nights before he had fought a gun battle with Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill Hickok over some woman in a saloon. Jesse James never fought in World War II as far as I knew. Tom Sawyer was news to me.

I was an impatient kid. “Cut to the chase” or “move on to the third act already” I would tell people later in life when the preamble to the story was already dragging my interest down. I wanted to know how many people Wendell killed in the war, not who his neighbors were or names of childhood friends like Tom Sawyer.

He said he shot a lot of animals as a kid, but shooting rabbits and squirrels was a whole lot easier than trying to bring down than a soldier firing back from behind rocks or trees. He didn’t know how many people he plugged, maybe none. He just spent his time in Europe walking in one direction and stepping over more bodies than were buried in all the Lutheran cemeteries between Kearney and the Mississippi. He used to take pictures of them, though he now had forgotten why. He burned them all one night shortly after he left Missouri. He said he was drunk. One day he wanted to go back to Europe and take pictures of living things, but only after he felt better. He never spoke directly to me. Either he looked at the ground or watched intently as his cigarette butts washed along the shoreline.

Today marks the 65th anniversary of the Normandy Invasion. Wendell was one of the tens of thousands of soldiers who hit Omaha Beach that morning. He said he just closed his eyes as the LCVP neared the shore, opening them only when the guys behind him pushed him out into the water. He said he swallowed half the red Atlantic that morning, lost his weapon almost immediately, pushed buddies aside as he fought the waves and found plenty more guns waiting for him when he finally struggled his way onto the sands.

Wendell rarely spoke of further wartime adventures beyond the shoreline, as if everything else, including the times he saw both Eisenhower and Patton, never really mattered. Even in his dreams, his war stopped at the sands of Omaha Beach, he once said softly. No matter how many questions I asked him, his war memories ended that cold morning in June, 1944.

He only saw his own blood once: the night he slipped and cracked a tooth while running past a dead horse looking for a place to pee. He was lucky, he said, in between puffs of smoke. No one else he really knew came home breathing. He let slip about spending some time in a hospital after the war which made no sense to me. What was he doing in a hospital if he had never been shot?

He went back to Missouri after the war, but his mom had died by then. His father was now living with a women Wendell hated because his old man had been hanging around with her even before he left for the Army. His girlfriend was gone; died in childbirth, his friends told him though no one would give him any information who the father was or even if the child had lived. He’d spent a couple of nights in jail for disorderly conduct or firing a gun into a house, I’m not quite sure any longer. Over the last decade plus, he had floated from one relative to friends to VA hospital. He was now living in Madison in his great aunt’s garage over on Jenifer Street, but he was going off to California shortly, hopefully to build ships.

He wanted to go back into the Army, but they wouldn't have him. He had tried finishing up his high school degree, but school never interested him. Whatever he would learn from books, he had already seen more with his eyes. He once said to me that he felt like one of those floating cigarette butts that needs some assistance making it back to shore.I don't know if he ever made it back I don't know if he ever made it back. I never saw Wendell again after that summer. The boy from Missouri had survived Omaha Beach. Whether the veteran I met more than fifty years ago found the strength to swim towards a more serene shoreline for himself remains unknown to me. I pray he did.

I Faint at the Sight of Real Blood...However

When I get jaundiced-eyed reading the humorous polemics of C. Wright Mills, the ruminations of Dwight MacDonald from Partisan Review or even the salacious events surrounding the lives of Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord and Madame de Staël, I kick back with a case of Smirnov, pack my brain stem in the freezer, and watch an example of one of my favorite film genres: the Japanese splatter film.

Examples like Ichi the Killer, Battle Royale, Guinea Pig, Shogun Sadism, Machine Girl and Tetsuo, the Iron Man are so over the top in their blood-spurting excess, hot gore juggling, severed limbs bouncing, and agonizing diamond-splitting screams that I need a drop cloth and ear plugs as part of my viewing pleasure. I'd invite others over, but I can't afford an in-house metal detector.

Grindhouse, Tarantino's homage to the American gut-wrenchers of the 1970s, is an afternoon field trip to Peck's Petting Zoo. Saw, Hostel, Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Halloween franchises are like subtle allegorical works of art penned by Herman Mankiewicz in comparison to these buckets of blood.

Japanese splatter-gore is simply raw, unadulterated tens on the gag-o-meter. Many are adaptations of successful manga comics, which means the readership is mostly male and in the millions. Knives, chainsaws, razors, swords, pipes, and shivs come in contact with eyes, ears, noses, heads, genitalia -- the end result a technicolor spray of red dye and Karo syrup with prosthetic limbs thrown around like fists at a drunken wedding party. This is gonzo with ginzu.

Basic story lines feature revenge gone beyond the pale, followed by mass mutilations, geysers of blood, abattoir hoedowns and nifty wire work (when affordable). And what's not to love about those weird foot-tapping ABBA-esque pop culture bubble-gum ditties that come out of nowhere and are sprinkled over the most graphic scenes like carobs on Sundaes? Makes me want to jump up and cut open cantaloupes (even in off-season) with battle axes and samurai swords. Watching them without subtitles is recommended; half the entertainment is creating your own dialogue.

Tokyo Gore Police comes from the visual effects master Yoshihiro Nishimura, make up wizard behind Suicide Club, Machine Girl and other films emphasizing hemoglobin hi-jinks. Eye-balling Eihi Shiina, one of Japan's top models, dancing around in her school girl outfits, flowing kimonos and various other manga inspired accoutrement is difficult at best.

Perhaps Lupo the Butcher was one of the progenitors of rivers of red corpuscles as comic relief. I first saw this diamond about 20 years ago at an animation festival. I laughed so hard I still cough up blood. Danny Antonucci, the Canadian animator behind this classic went on to create Ed, Edd, and Eddy for the Cartoon Network. Had Lupo lived to have sons, they would have been these three boys, minus, of course, selected limbs.

A Cultural Reference Older Than Six Minutes

My last blog was entitled "Wimpy is for Hamburgers, Not Americans." I thought it was a rather clever play on words and the title worked well for the main point of the post. With 2.5 millions Americans locked up in stir and with Supermax prisons dotting the countryside like big box roach motels, why the irrational concern from wimpy members of Congress, stoked by whiny media tele-prompter readers, towards adding a couple of hundred more guys from Gitmo to the ledger books? It wasn't as if these toughs were actual super villains who could bend metal or fly at the speed of sound.

I remember in high school being so clever with my double entendres and smart-ass remarks that 1) I got punched in the nose by teacher and student alike; 2) the principal christened my very own chair in detention; 3) I spent most Saturday night in my bedroom alone watching professional wrestling matches broadcast out of the Twin Cities; and 4) even I was confused by half the things I referenced. I would read the encyclopedia just to flavor my classroom disruptions with punchlines a tad more intellectual than "ya, says you" or "your momma wears combat boots from Yosts."

One day, I was slapped with three hours worth of detention for comparing boar, bore and Boer with the yawn factor of the teacher in front of me. Talk about being an obscurantist. None of my fellow classmates understood the final Boer reference, blowing the stand-up totally even though I was seated at the time. Mr. D. did, as he was English, had been born around 1900, and as I woefully discovered later, one of his cousins had died in an ambush there. I did get some laughs when I was dragged out of my seat and shoved out the door. My punishment: writing 50 times Rupert Brooke's poem, The Soldier.

I received several e-mails over the last 48 hours asking me to explain the meaning behind the "Wimpy is for Hamburgers, Not Americans" title. Was I making fun of hamburgers? Was I a vegetarian? Was I saying that Americans are "not?" I thought the line was self-evident. It never occurred to me I had written words in need of a footnote. Then I realized the title actually had a double meaning, one even I was not familiar with. Me bad. I apologize. I should have done a Google search myself.

I was referencing Popeye the Sailor's sidekick, J. Wellington Wimpy. Wimpy, as the above cartoon illustrates, will do anything for a hamburger. In fact, the character's "I would gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today" was, at one time, as famous an expression as "duck and cover." The Wimpy reference dates back to the 1930s. "Duck and cover" to the 1950s. I'll make my younger readers feel comfortable. So what do you think of The Vapors?

I had no idea that at one time there was an English fast food chain called Wimpys. My father was a butcher in Madison; what was the point of ever going out for a hamburger when I could have rib-eye any time I wanted?

So that's all there is, there ain't no more. Nothing subversive, just a plea for our Congressional representatives to stop whining like a bunch of politically grandstanding stick figures. Speaking of producing appropriate wood, this town in Hardin, Montana is certainly living up to its name.

Wimpy is for Hamburgers, Not Americans

I’ve always thought of myself as a tough American male. Granted, I never went into the military service, nor have I ever fired a gun heavier than what the good Lord gave me at birth; but I’ve driven the freeways of Los Angeles at night, fought off the wheel-chaired crowds on Black Friday, and suffered through enough blind dates with professional virgins to produce stigmata.

Toughness. I’ve walked the aisles of gun shows in fatigues with an unsmiling face and clenched fist looking for semi automatic super-soakers; been tattooed by near sighted artists (I still have URE MOMA in a place only a double jointed gymnastic could wash properly); and researched enough urban lingo to ask a white clerk in a Sioux Falls, South Dakota Wal-Mart whether the store sold 50 Cents' Straight to the Bank as a single.

Toughness. I gave rocks to peaceniks next to me to throw at National Guardsmen during my years at Wisconsin, had my girlfriend purchase condoms when the check-out counter was manned by a female, and refused to purchase a Rolex on the streets of New York unless the guy from Somalia produced a bill of authenticity.

Toughness. I’ve attended enough court-ordered opera and ballet performances to qualify for anger management credit and sat through every foo-foo French film where two women kissed each other in bath tubs for no apparent reason. I’ve run up the Laurel and Hardy stairs in Silverlake, yet refused all CPR or hospitalization care afterward. I’ve walked down Hollywood Blvd at 1 AM looking for the John Bunny Walk of Fame star (1715 Vine). I know from toughness.

So I was somewhat confused by my sudden wave of wimpification this morning. I actually passed on my normal breakfast of a burnt piece of toast and a rotten egg. Then I remembered I had fallen asleep in front of the television last night watching Fox News.

Fox News has saved me from being a non-muscled star on MSNBC’s Lock-Up for years. Whenever too much testosterone courses through these old plaque-congealed arteries, I don’t rush out and shoot up the neighborhood or pick fights with older arthritic women waiting in line at the local salad bar. I sit down with a glass of saltpeter and watch Fox News, where every segment concerns Armageddon in your backyard, toxic threats in your front yard, and human malignancies coming at you from every direction. I get so shook up I forget to leave my apartment. The 24/7 fear factor is so acute that yesterday I had 48 cases of beer delivered to sustain me throughout the long Memorial Day weekend.

Today’s scare de jure is the closing of Hotel Gitmo and how western civilization will collapse like Rome against Odoacer in 476A.D., if these prisoners end up on real American soil. Last week, the cause of our extinction was Swine Flu, the week before it was Obama and socialism and before that it was Obama and --- (fill in the blank). Where to put all the un-indicted co-conspirators picked up God only knows where for who knows what reason has everyone in Congress pulling out their out-sourced backbones and scrubbing away their Davy Crockett, Kit Carson, and George Patton July 4th State Fair vocabularies.

Not since post Larry Craig, when both genders in Congress refused to use public urinals within a 500 mile radius of the Twin Cities, has their been so much male wimpiness and outright terror amongst our representatives. I thought guys from Montana and Nevada and Kentucky were born with steel ones. I dissected a frog in ninth grade with larger "nads" than these guys. Then I was told by Mr. Olson, my biology teacher, that what I was examining were ovaries.

Men who look manly enough to whip any Waldorf salad with or without croutons; who are virile enough to stand tall and justify not giving the average American the same sort of health benefits they automatically receive; and who bathe daily in the poisonous waters of Lake Pharisaism, with its dual undertows of hypocrisy and sanctimoniousness, suddenly become like a bunch of frightened three year-olds in a bedroom without a night light.

A 24 hour marathon session of Lock-Ups is video proof that our current Supermax prisons are simply too laid-back to hold these Gitmo ghouls. The current prison population of rapists, murderers, skin-heads, pedophiles, arsonists, and Central American drug lords is no match for any group that can withstand 24/7 viewings of American Idol audition tapes from Sheboygan. These toughs make Lex Luthor and the Joker look like comic book villains. Only New York cabbies act tougher and are angrier.

Now I’m not Brandeis, but doesn't securing any of these cutthroats in anything other than a military prison or naval brig force us under law to go through all of that bothersome Perry Mason/Judge Judy stuff. Why bother? Who are they going to complain to? I don’t even want to do jury duty unless I can give someone the chair.

I remember some pantywaist bleeding heart liberal from Arkansas telling me decades ago that he used to live close to an WWII German POW’s camp. Hogwash, I told him. Then I did some investigation and discovered that during the Second World War this country housed some 400 thousand Axis POW’s in about 500 separate camps.

Several Christmases ago, instead of receiving from my Wisconsin admirers another polar fleece sweater for the sub-zero Los Angeles winters, what should Santa deliver but a fascinating book about my home state: Stalag Wisconsin by Betty Cowley. Who would have thunk that America's Dairyland held sway to over 20 thousand German and Japanese soldiers in 38 branch camps? A number of these men refused repatriation after the war, deciding instead to wait in line to secure perpetual season seats at Packer games.

Lately we've been told that Nazis and Fascists were weak-kneed weenies compared to the Al-Qaeda threat. WWII produced the “greatest generation” where big balls became so mandatory that even capons and mules were required to grow a pair. But followers of an organization that can wreck the world of English spelling by simply refusing to follow a Q with a U shakes the very foundations of who we are. We're not equipped for such psychic intimidation. Is it any wonder after 9-11 our generation was told to go on vacation or the terrorists would win? Instead of Pearl Harbor, we went instead to Sag Harbor.

As none of our super-max prisons are anything other than playgrounds, perhaps Congress might favor these guys on American soil if we wrapped everything up with a little bit of historical bunting and made a profit out of it: Quarantine them in an Andersonville or a Camp Douglas. These names are more American than Guantanamo. The possibility of a privately run gift store enhances its marketability, as would daily tour groups where tourists could feed the prisoners non-pork products. I think Fox and Friends would kvell over this suggestion except for the pork products stuff.

Excelsior! Turn me sideways and slap me with marmalade. Thank goodness for my comic book collection. I knew something was not right in tough guy land. Why would NRA members of Congress act and sound as if none had ever held a fully automatic weapon in their hands? Or lose their courage like some punk asses waiting to ride the Cyclone at Coney Island? Or put their cojones in moth balls (is that redundant?)? What weren't we being told?

It’s now become as clear as the picture of these ovaries I just downloaded. The pundits with their pint-sized pecs, consistently so wrong on so many subjects for so long a period of time have been sending us masked signals: Beware these imprisoned aliens for good reason. The answer like all of life's meanings emanates from both the Marvel Universe, X-Men in particular and Tolkien.

Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp is a government front, a rouse, a black ops illusion. Blow away the smoke. Gitmo is actuality Genosha, the existence of which was first broken in Uncanny X-Men #235 (October 1988) by investigative reporters Chris Claremont and Rick Leonardi. The characters the ACLU want loose to traipse along the boarded up shops of Main Street aren’t ordinary run of the mill super terrorists. They're far worse than that. In the language of Arda, Al Quada means "mutant".

Yes, those mutants with the X chromosome. Unless kept behind mutant secure bars (none of which currently exist in any Supermax), these forces would align themselves with the likes of Magneto, Mr. Sinister, and possibly even Apocalypse and go after the Justice League of America or the snot-nosed Teen Titans. Well screw that. Other than Batman, there isn’t a single member of the JLA team that has a decent movie franchise going so what sort of fight would that be.

Gitmo isn’t a prison run by the Navy or Marines. The individuals keeping us safe from thugs that can read our minds, dissolve metals, shoot lasers from their eyes, levitate buildings, turn rivers into concrete among other powers are thankfully named Punchout, Pipeline, Wipeout, and Hawkshaw. Thank God for the Press Gang and the Magistrates. They might not be as tough as Seals or Army Rangers, but they have really cool names.

Now that I've put all the pieces together, I feel less sweaty about my future. I understand why Congress, the President, Fox News and the bubble safe Washington punditry class want to keep Genosha open. They're not protecting us from mortals. They're protecting us from bad mutants. I can't wait to call up Moira MacTaggert and tell her of my conclusions. Perhaps afterwards we can head off to the Troubadour. I hear the Acolytes are performing tonight their number one hit, "Legacy Virus". But first I have to reseal my Days of Future Past and Fall of the Mutants issues for they do speak the truth.

Webcam: Canada goose nest near Edmonton

I love this sort of stuff and, yes, I watch action like this for hours on end, though I do tend to be embarrassed during courting season when I wish all concerned would simply get a room.

One Picture Tells a Thousand Stories

Short films still get short shrift in the commercial marketplace. While we junkies have specific film festivals, cataloging sites like Short Film Central, You Tube, Google Films, AWNtv and a multiple of other internet viewing locations (when permission is given) to keep us abreast of this wonderful perverse world, the short film remains the step-child of the business, given its eye blink of allotted time during the Oscars. True auteurism can exist only in the short film.

Gems surface, burn brightly for a short period of time, then disappear, like some pharaoh's tomb, into the shifting sands of obscurity. Most of my gold strikes occur late at night when forced to retire to the couch due to some minor indiscretion of months past finally coming to light, sleep becomes impossible over the crying and banging of suitcases being packed. I thought the belief in Jesus, like the picking of Supreme Court justices, was all about empathy, but I digress.

Currently the National Film Board of Canada (wish we had an organization like this in America), the Cannes Film Festival and You Tube are sponsoring the Fifth Annual "internet eyeballs choose the winner" competition from a selection of ten award winning short films. Viewing them all in one sitting (I think my friend walked out on me during selection number three, but I'm not sure as my headphones were on), made me laugh and cry and fall in love all over again.

My favorite of the ten is The Facts in the Case of Mister Hollow, a hauntingly mesmerizing piece of such virtuosity that I kept coming back to it over and over again. If Sherlock Holmes were a film maker, this would have been his masterwork to jerk around the guys from CSI. For any serious student of film, this little diamond is must viewing for its use of camera and single frame movement .

Coming in a close second is Sebastian's Voodoo, a piece of creepy animation so Christ-like in its implications that perhaps I might be reading a tad to much into it. The ending is a true Kleenex moment.



Rounding out the top three is the stutter framed Walter Ate a Peanut, a testament to man's ability to withstand any inhumanity except food on the kitchen floor. If marriage is a box of chocolates, I'll stick with my peanut allergy.

Sandbox: The Real Men in Black

I was reminded of this clip several days ago when I overheard several young gamers discussing the merits of the latest killer videos out there. According to them, game animation has reached such exquisite levels that you could all but smell the sweat of bleeding terrorists and the dust of exploding mud huts. Makes me want to go out and learn how to work my opposable thumbs again.

Sandbox is directed towards those armchair warriors whose closest brush with death is shaky hand eye coordination as a first person shooter playing Sniper Elite or safely watching authentic Iraqi and Afghan footage on You Tube over a couple of cold ones. This short powerful piece of animation, adapted from Colby Buzzell's Iraq memoir, My War: Killing Time in Iraq should preface all war games that first need a wall socket to activate. Directed by Richard Robbins, this emotionally draining segment is from a 2007 documentary entitled Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience.

The book is a must read; the film a must see. For the young testosterone filled barbarians out there, however, far too little viscera of the enemy is shown to rate this high on the popular play value scale.

A Mother's Day Cabbage Cleanse

I play Russian roulette with my arteries whenever I walk into a deli. My fatal coronary will be due to my high school math teacher, Mr. Schenck. He used to say, "Life is short, death is long, you're making both unbearable for me," during our daily hour together. I wasn't one of his better students in trig or calculus. I never asked stupider questions or had a more open-mouthed, dumb as a sack of nails look then those days when trying to comprehend math beyond the multiplication tables.

I did get something out of Mr. Schenck's sixty minutes of daily humiliation. I modified his aphorism about life to justify ordering cheese blintzes, corn beef sandwiches, potato pancakes, and a whole assortment of other normal heart-stoppers while I still have working taste buds. Life is far too short, so why not live it as a glutton?

This afternoon, I walked down to my favorite coronary occlusion, but ordered a big bowl of cabbage soup instead. Cabbage soup will always remind me of my English mother for it was her favorite meal. I have a bowl of it every Mother's Day in her memory. Any other time of the year, I would rather eat dirt.

My mother was the ultimate survivor. She weathered a cold orphanage from the age of three (her mother could not afford to keep her at home) and a burst appendix by six, with lifetime bouts of simmering peritonitis as a result. She pulled through dreary English winters and the nondescript summers that followed. She endured Dickensian schools in post Edwardian times. She persevered against the writings of Trollope, Thackeray and Bulwer-Lytton, yet her formal education ended at sixteen.

She saw Churchill speak in the rain and Hitchcock walking with his wife. She worked a thirty hour day during the Great Depression, juggling several jobs while taking care of her invalid mother. She outlasted The Battle of Britain and Werner Von Braun’s V2 Rockets , during which she was a daytime air raid warden and a night-time bomb shelter inhabitant. When the war ended, she counted the number of shrapnel scars on her body and decided enough was enough. She and my dad sailed to America on the Queen Mary to become Yankee Doodle Dandies.

She wasn't much for talking about her personal life. Every time I would ask her a question about her days in London, she would say, "What are you writing a biography?" Obviously not! Her expression would have been one of glassy-eyed indifference at the alliterative nonsense, "Greatest Generation" as if anyone in her generation had had any choice in the matter.

My mom was no econ professor from Dartmouth, but like everyone else who had tasted the gruel of the 1930s, she understood enough about the cyclical nature of the marketplace to forever be on the lookout for the next slide downwards. Economic Armageddon was always right around the corner for her. The banks would fail again; soup kitchens would once more litter the landscape; riding the rails would be the chosen form of public transportation other than shank's pony. The world would turn to cabbage soup as salvation. Then, no doubt, to the closest bathroom.

Pointing to the clouds over Lake Monona, she would say in her best Michael Caine Cockney accent, "One day those annoying rain clouds will be dust clouds spiraling towards the Greenbush area and they won't be a bunch of Hoovers in reverse".

Huh? I've Googled every English writer since Bede trying to reference that quote. No luck. What did she mean? England never witnessed any Woody Guthrie scenes during the Depression. I asked Greenbush old timers whether Madison had ever experienced dust bowls? I was seven years old at the time. They looked at me as if I were nuts; then they walked over to their liquor cabinets to check on the contents.

Maybe it was never meant to mean anything other than it was time for me to vacuum the rugs again.

According to her, most of England not associated with the Royal Family or aging Edwardian figures lived hand to mouth on vast quantities of cabbage soup. Perhaps, that's why the British Isles was so verdant. In fact this mush had kept the British people going since the days of the Celts. Had Harold II and his men at Hastings supped on cabbage soup the evening of October 13, 1066, the Anglo-Saxons could have beaten back the Norman invasion by collectively drowning them in a cleanse.

Certainly not a great story to persuade a child to continue to eat cabbage soup. I grew up believing that the lowly cabbage was, along with the RAF and the atomic bomb, the prime mover in winning World War II. Volunteering to face Axis gunfire rather than sitting home eating this swill made sense to me even as a youngster. At least away from this soup standing was an option.

Convinced that "another" dust bowl would soon hit Madison and we would all starve to death three times a day, I went out behind my house on Mound Street and plowed up the back forty...feet, planting nothing but cabbages. No tomatoes, lettuce, or rhubarb for me. I had become a survivalist without even owning a semi-automatic. At least eating cabbage soup would give me the strength to make a healthy run on the banks, my mom would say off-handedly, as over the years, she put bucket after bucket of this slop in front of me. In fact I suspect I would have kept on running.

She loved cabbage soup. I ate so much of that stuff as a kid that I could have filled a sixth Lake around Madison with its by-product. The English did not so much lose their Empire as poop it away.

So to celebrate Mother's Day, I offer up to my readers a film that certainly my mother was well aware of. I can imagine her sitting in a darkened theatre in 1943, smoking a fag (English slang for "cigarette" so put your eyeballs back in their sockets), waiting like everyone else to get through a war-time movie, perhaps starring Tyrone Powers or John Mills, before fleeing back to the air raid shelters and the privvies.




Note that the boys remain outside to take in the fresh air while the girls stand around in an airless kitchen breathing the cabbage soup fumes.

Why Mothers Want You To Clean Up Your Room

What better way of celebrating Mother's Day than by cleaning up and throwing out everything that might some day be of value on eBay? None of us wants to be the cause of entire neighborhoods going up in flames after an H-bomb attack.

No doubt my mother was ahead of the curve when she tossed out all of my original blacklight posters from the 1960s, the Janice Joplin autograph from her November 21, 1969 Dane County Expo concert, early X-Men, Spiderman and Fantastic Four comics, as well as assorted signed first edition novels, agit-prop materials, and hundreds of photos of riot-torn Madison during my time on campus. Her excuse: She thought I was never coming home again. I'd left for one afternoon to go down to the Field Museum in Chicago.

I am not a slob. I dust whenever I see air particles dancing around my apartment, or find myself able to blow smoke rings upon exhalation. Used paper plates are placed neatly in the dishwasher alongside unbroken plastic cutlery. Kitchen grime is sand blasted off every six months -- whether necessary or not. I pick up after myself unless the magazines, newspapers, books, and pizza cartons lay there to pick up falling dust or to hide bare carpet or molding floorboards.

My mother once said that if I didn't start cleaning up after myself, I'd have no one other than CDC mandated cleaning crews breaking into my apartment. She was wrong. Every so often I found singing girlfriends willing to tidy up around me -- though credit card charges proved to be more expensive than the Haz-Met crews forced upon me by federal law. Funny how some songs are made for dusting and vacuuming.

Craig Virden: RIP

One of the most recognizable faces of the New York children’s book publishing community passed away yesterday of a pulmonary embolism at the far too early age of 56. Craig Virden was Bunyanesque, boisterous, wonderfully erudite, a marvelous raconteur, a natural humorist. I knew him first from his days at Scholastic Books, then as the producer of DIC's Get A Long Gang. In the mid-nineties he became head of the children’s book division of Random House.

For twenty years I would see Craig at children’s literary functions. I would wait my turn for this force of nature always had members of the publishing world and the literati surrounding him. I would go up to him and tap him on his knees for he did tower over me. "Any good stories to relate about publishing life in the Big City (New York is a big city, Los Angeles is just a city)?" I would echo up to him. Damn if he wouldn’t begin to spin forth tales that made me burst out loud laughing. He would then be dragged away to countless meetings, and I would see him again at the next big publishing get-together. I was never sure whether any of his stories were true, but they certainly were funny.

To get a small measure of the man, here is his Publisher’s Weekly blog from this year’s Bologna Children's Book Fair. I made it a must every morning to read Craig's observations of a publishing world in flux.

I extend my heartfelt condolences to his lovely wife, literary agent Nancy Gallt who I have also known for years, and to their children. Craig will be sorely missed.

NOIR OBGYN: FINGERS OF FURY

I’m a big fan of Adult Swim, Cartoon Network’s late night batch of idiocy for the insomniac in all of us. Why go to bed after the Colbert Report when such eye-catching gems as Assy McGee; Aqua Teen Hunger Force; Frisky Dingo; Robot Chicken; Venture Brothers; Superjail; Lucy, Daughter of the Devil; and dozens of like-minded shows can prevent dysfunctional males from dialing Escorts-R-Us or walking into a local bar sober and volunteering to be pummeled with pool cues?

I’ve wanted to develop a show for Adult Swim since its inception in the fall of 2001. Had I gone soft though? Had swimming in the glorified pond of children’s programming for the last several decades withered my cretin-grinning George Bush frat boy, pants down to the ankles, vomit hurling, tongue-licking frozen street poles male credibility somewhat?

Look at my résumé of shows I've worked on: Doe-eyed creatures dripping goodness and light; comic book superheroes dripping goodness and light; little girls and smiling ghosts dripping goodness and light. I've produced more light than Con Ed and more goodness than Willy Wonka's chocolate factory.

Adult Swim executives would laugh their boney asses off at my very presence. What would I, a purveyor of soft talking, smiley-faced animals and loopy "let's now all drink our milk together" programs know from being adult. I would not be read. I would be forcefully thrown out of their offices by way of their plate glass windows; or sneered at as a pseudo-hip kind of guy. What children's programming executive could create anything of merit for that portion of the population legally allowed to pilot cars over cliffs? What would the concept need to be to prove I still had male jackass qualities?

As I’ve matured, I’ve become shorter and more crinkly. I now wear my polyester pants up around my goiter, just the same way I did in high school; my liver spots have grandchildren of their own. Had I matured to the point of no return?

A wag once described Adult Swim as proof positive that males 17+ will watch anything if they're drunk. While I’m a male and my fuzzy vision is now due more to cataracts than carafes filled with alcoholic beverages, my mind still wallows in tumescence jokes, flatulence gags, and the proud ability to act my age as long as it’s twelve. Women flock to men like this...not! In fact, I’m so beyond 17+ that I now need a baby strainer for my Seven and Seven.

Much like a raging yeast infection, my Adult Swim concept germinated from a hot spot I’d prefer not discussing in mixed company; but I must do so -- otherwise this post ends here. Several years ago, I was searching for former classmates to inveigle them to attend our high school reunion, and through the Internet re-established contact with L. Now living in New England, L had become a successful doctor, specializing in what my dad used to call “vomen problems.” You know like “Vhat’s the matter mit you? You have vomen problems?” I remember in high school that L, unlike other girls, gave me the time of day. Why it was Mountain Standard Time I don't know as Madison, Wisconsin is in the Central Time Zone.

I grew up in a household with an English mother who never spoke about anything other than the weather and how large a disappointment I was vis-à-vis the other kids in the neighborhood. The mere mention of the word “sex” to my dad had him asking me what cut of meat I wanted for dinner. He was a butcher, so he knew from brisket and flanken, but preferred taking me out to dairy farms for an afternoon to observe animals at work and play.


Cow With An Awesome Talent - Watch more Funny Videos

One of the farmers said that watching animals was the best education in learning about the birds and bees. I had no idea what pigs, goats, horses and cows had to do with the birds and the bees. I got pooped on and stung a lot trying to find out. I eventually learned everything I needed to know about sex from reading the Farmer’s Almanac, Mad Magazine, and going to see Japanese monster movies at the Capitol and Orpheum theatres. To this day, I can’t watch a Godzilla or Mothra movie without becoming flushed with embarrassment. But I digress.

I remember in second grade a teacher telling me her husband was an OBGYN, which was weird because I had always called her Mrs. Murphy. Several years later, I learned the name of that wacky free-swinging organ that consumes the thoughts of 50% of the world’s population who don’t have one. With that second word, I was almost halfway to learning the 20 plus letters in the English alphabet. It might not have been the best way to learn the ABC’s, but it beat all the picture books given to me in high school.

At about the same time I was re-connecting with L, I was informed by A, a young lady who makes her living as a cartoon voice actor in Toronto, that the Canadian Broadcaster, Teletoons, was searching for ideas to fill its Detour slot. Detour is Canada’s post 9 p.m. time period, where more adult-themed animation is broadcast. Apparently Teletoons was tired of buying retreads from American suppliers like Adult Swim and were seeking more original content for their audience.

I’ve known A for decades. She’s gorgeous, talented, and has a mouth on her like a stevedore. Whether her Teletoons source was actually a drunk peeing behind Massey Hall or some graffiti on the interior walls of the Brass Rail, I don’t know; but she asked me whether I had any perverse cartoon ideas not involving her and her Neapolitan mastiff. Not at the moment, I told her, but I promised I would get back to her.

Why was I asked to come up with a concept? I glanced downward and saw that I was still flying the flag of the United States of America. That alone would make this exercise futile, because, like any other Yankee without landed status, that formidable beast, Canadian Content Rules would come into play. It would not merely be an exercise in writing. What I came up with for Detour could work as well for Adult Swim.

Canada is a smart country. It protects its own against the American artistic juggernaut, whereas we only protect Caribbean tax havens. For a Canadian company to get full government tax credits on any production, whether television series or film, it must employ as much Canadian talent, both in front of and behind the camera, as is humanly possible. Only within the last decade or so have a number of States such as Louisiana, Wisconsin, and New Mexico, to name but three, wised up to give our production companies tax breaks as well.

Read up on these Canadian rules at your leisure, for the graphs are fascinating and the accounting verbiage grammatically exciting; and with an ending as favorable to Americans as Pearl White being tied to the tracks of the Burlington Northern with a sizzling stick of dynamite in her ear and no rescue in sight.

I decided to try and come up with a concept knowing that if anyone did like it, I would have to give up 100% of the rights and any creative control if it were to go any further. I might be thrown a cruller or two and given a coupon to a Second Cup location, but that would be about it.

A % of something is better than 100% of nothing goes the saying. At least someone in Canada would read the idea, which is more than I could hope for here at the time.

Adult Swim cartoons are full of gratuitous sexual innuendoes and I wanted in on them (no pun intended). L had told me a bunch of OBGYN stories which creeped me out, but no ideas were really forthcoming. When I need writer inspiration I sit cross-legged in front of the television with some Hiram Walker in one hand, Triple Sec in the other, and a case of Bols strapped around my ankles. I open up a pack of Gitanes Brunes. Sometimes I even turn the set on. This dog was in for a long evening of solitary drunken debauchery.



If it weren’t for Turner Classic Movies, I would have one less reason to pickle my liver or burn out my lungs. That channel has saved me creatively more often than sandbags and sweat save Grand Forks from the Red River. TCM was offering old style Film Noir night. If nothing else, I could drink along with the actors in the movies.

Gun Crazy, Nightmare Alley, Kiss Me Deadly, and Out of the Past. By the end of this little marathon of gem classics, I knew what my concept would be. But first I had to remember where I left my apartment. I stood up; I fell down; I swore I saw Hoagy Carmichael sitting at a piano with a full orchestra behind him.



I suddenly felt "noir". I threw my shot glass against the wall; I desaturated all the color from my cheeks; then in a clipped staccato fashion, I commenced my very own voice over flashback.

That evening began the birth canal process for NOIR OBGYN: FINGERS OF FURY. Perhaps I might have gone overboard in combining “Noir” with the world of the “OBGYN.” When this idea was finally submitted to the folks up in Toronto, they were so aghast, they bodily threw A out of the office. I’m not sure whether it had anything to do with the material or the fact that the male executives wanted to see her bounce slowly, methodically, and deliberately down the stairs.

NOIR OBGYN is a speculum-swinging doctor by day, a stripper by night, and a vigilante packing more heat than two dozen microwaves all the rest of the time. The town she strumpets around in, Turpitude, is several levels of inhabitability below that of Chernobyl and Bhopal. It's population is corrupt; the music is sultry; the streets are so dangerous, the only parts of speech allowed out after dark are subject, verb and predicate.

Have I gone a tad too suggestive? Perhaps. I re-reviewed all the episodes of Assy McGee again. At least my main character doesn't expel gas like a Ford Pinto every time she speaks.



As for NOIR OBGYN, the series idea itself will be posted here in its entirety within several days.

The Squish Heard Underfoot Might Be Marco Polo: Adventures On Marrs

Ever since I was a kid and some old Greenbush sage told me cockroaches survived atomic explosions, I've had a fascination with insects of the order Blattaria. Of course, living in the Greenbush area afforded me many opportunities to see cockroaches up close and personal. There was the time one almost fell down my throat while I lay on the floor of an abandoned house, staring up at a ceiling full of them. As I grew older, the enthrallment to let them split the rent, eat at the same table, or even share my bed (no matter how drunk either I or the cockroaches were) dissipated to zero. Cockroaches as animated characters, now that's a whole other phylum.

Cockroaches have appeared as subordinates in such films as A Bug's Life, Twilight of the Cockroaches, An American Tale, Monsters and Aliens, WALL-E, and Men in Black, as well as dozens of television series, including one of my favorites, Oggie and the Cockroaches.

People sometimes ask me, "Greenbush Boy, where do you come up with your twisted concepts and are you featured on the Homeland Security Watch list because of them?"

"Beats me," I tell them; but my creative journey, much like removing oneself from the TSA Watch List, is circuitous and about as difficult to follow as footprints in water. I need a GPS system most of the time just to locate my shadow.



Take, for instance, Irwin, the cockroach star of Adventures on Marrs...Landfill. Around 1970, I first heard a song titled "Tennessee Bird Walk" performed by country western stars Jack Blanchard and Misty Morgan. I was still living at home on Mills Street, next to the James Bowen House, in the family basement by the broken water heater and the old chicken coop. I had three possessions in life, none linked to my dignity: a broken hot plate, a pre-war sofa bed, and a rabbit-eared black and white TV that broadcast only farm reports, tele-evangelists, and country music programming. I liked "Tennessee Bird Walk." It was the kind of twangy, down home music I could really get high listening to without feeling too guilty about leaving the haze of Deep Purple and Black Sabbath for a few minutes. Amazingly, these two heavy metal giants are still out there flailing away in the 2009 cardiac arrhythmia tours. But I digress.

Several years after "Tennessee Bird Walk", Blanchard and Morgan came out with a song that fit perfectly into the singalong world of Doctor Demento. The lyrics of "The Cockroach Stomp" were so perverse that they made my other favorite song on death, Jim Carroll's "People Who Die," sound like a nursery rhyme. Country western music had immortalized cockroach destruction.

Several years ago I ran across this nonsense:



This video reminded me of the afternoon I sat in Brittingham Park watching a homeless man try to fish what looked to be parts of a broken terrarium out of Lake Monona. The man refused to go anywhere near the water and was using, not to successfully, an iron bar to coax his obsession to the shore. I was about eight at the time and I had just come from a hard day at Longfellow Grade School.

I'm 25 years away from being in this picture.

Without any hesitation I jumped into the nutrient-filled, algae-clogged lake water, teeming with bloated fish skins. Only when the water circled my throat did I remember that I had yet to learn how to swim (never did) and I was wearing my Sunday go to meeting clothes from school. Thankfully I had just seen Lassie basically do the same thing with Little Timmy, so I dog paddled this piece of broken flotsam ashore .

As soon as the westerlies blew me ashore, the old man grabbed the terrarium. A bunch of slimy bugs fell from their watery hiding places and scattered in all directions. Picking it up high over his head, he yelled something that sounded like, "Get thee back into the water, demon witch,"and flung the terrarium back out into the lake. He then began the poking process all over again with his iron pole.

I sat there soaked, with a dead fish in my back pocket, while the homeless guy banged away at the water, wondering what excuse I would give my parents this time for my appearance. The guy suddenly stopped walloping the water and strode towards me, snarling that I had poisonous water beetles climbing all over me. I looked down. There was one struggling to climb out of my pant cuff. That was enough. I ran screaming out of the park almost becoming roadkill on West Washington Avenue. I spent the next day and a half submerged in a bathtub, ignoring that fact that I had abandoned my school books and the next day's assignments in the park. I guess the homeless guy tossed them into the lake. They washed ashore in Hannibal , Missouri several months later.

Then, about the same time as the above video, I read an article about a grade school science terrarium mistakenly carted off to the city dump during the summer recess. The kids, the school board, parents, the mayor went nuts at this costly mistake. The article mentioned how the kids had lovingly taken care of the plants and the water filtration system and the bugs, slugs, grubs and other creepy crawlies for years, and now had no reason to live or at least attend class. One precocious child was quoted as saying she felt very worried for the safety of her "friends" because, like her house pet "Fluffy," none of the "glass house" occupants had ever had to survive on their own.

"Terrarium." "Glass house." "Pampered insects." That night I began working on Adventures on Marrs...Landfill.

This story is a simple tale of a daydreamer: A cockroach named Irwin, who has lived a pampered existence in a science terrarium in Ms. Goff's sixth-grade class. While all his friends frolic, doing bug and insect party things, Irwin sits attentively listening to all of Ms. Goff's lectures on science and outer space travel -- especially about those unmanned explorations on the planet Mars.

Irwin watches all the educational movies shown in class, and every night he studies all the forgotten homework left on top of his glass home. He hopes one day to be called by a Mr. Houston to rocket off into space and do some exploring of his own. He keeps a diary of his life in the glass house, which all the inhabitants call affectionately Casa a Pupae. Like every visionary, he doodles faces in his book.

One day Irwin and his friends wake up and discover they are no longer in Ms. Goff's class, but some place called Marrs which, as Irwin notes, was always spelled incorrectly on the blackboard. Unfortunately, the "Landfill" part of the sign had long since disintegrated; but to Irwin, his wish had come true. Obviously, Mr. Houston wanted his and his friends to explore the planet really badly because no advance warning had been given and certainly there were no NASA training sessions. He didn't even have to spin around in circles.

What Irwin and his crew are about to explore on Marrs

Irwin observes in his diary of the similarities between the Marrtian landscape and Ms. Goff's classroom floor. Perhaps being an astronaut will not be as challenging as it is made out to be. Perhaps Marrs and Earth are not that dissimilar after all.

Irwin's diary begins here.