Starring Neil Patrick Harris (our favorite -- and out -- former child-doctor), Felicia Day (she most recently of the awesome web series The Guild, and Nathan Fillion (...dreamy). The series follows the efforts of Dr. Horrible (Harris) to get into the Evil League of Evil and win the love of Penny (Day), while superhero Captain Hammer (Fillion) tries to prevent both. And there's singing.

It is truly awesome. Click on the picture or the text link. Do it now. Watch the first two acts (Act III will be released on Saturday the 19th). But be aware that all three acts will be taken down on the 20th. After that they'll be available through iTunes for a fee per Act.

So watch them now for free, while you can, my cheap cheap friends. I think they're great, and I can't wait to see how the iTunes downloads do, commercially. I expect they'll do very well.

This morning, for instance, we were given the luxury of choosing from two different prompts: "Where were you last night?" and "The earth rumbled..."

Here's what I came up with:

The earth rumbled...
Where were you last night?

As I said, sometimes the magic happens, and sometimes it doesn't. Sigh.

As part of our daily work, we do a lot of quick writings. Here's one of those from last week. The prompt (devised by yours truly) was "I heard that song on the radio..."

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I heard that song on the radio: Barry Manilow's "Copacabana." It was the first song I had tuned to when I got my first portable radio, appropriately enough, from Radio Shack. Around the time our aerial antenna started failing and we finally got cable, the family made at-least-weekly trips to the local 'Shack for replacement and upgrade supplies. I remember getting it on one of those trips, though not what I'd done to deserve a treat. I'd been told I could pick something out if it wasn't too expensive, and I knew exactly what I wanted. My radio was shaped like Donald Duck's head.

I never really liked Mickey Mouse, but I'd been crazy about that duck with the rage issues as long as I could remember. Now he could go anywhere I went. He did.

I put the 9v battery in the back of his head and clicked the volume dial from off to three or four. I expected to hear music, something like what the cool older kids listened to. From the speaker in the back of Donald's head all I heard was static. Slowly thumbing the tuning dial, I heard that voice. "Her name was Lola, she was a showgirl," and I was hooked. Obsessed, even. When the song ended I spun the dial wildly, desperately trying to find another station playing that song about the hottest spot north of Havana. Luckily, it was the mid-1970s, and Lola's yellow feathers in her hair (and her dress cut down to there) were all over the airwaves.

It was the only song I wanted to hear, and wherever Donald and I were, chances were you'd hear static, a snippet of non-"Copacabana"-song, static, a snippet of non-"Copacabana"-song, static...

My parents tired of the song surprisingly quickly. I remember hiding in my bedroom closet with the door closed, the back of Donald's head to my ear while well-trained fingers worked the tuning dial in the dark, searching, searching for someplace that wasn't suburban Dallas. Searching for a crowded floor where music and passion were always in fashion.

I was too young to really understand what the song was about, but perhaps the message was as true for me then as it was for Lola and Tony in their faded past. Don't fall in love. Because even in the mid-70s, "Copacabana" wouldn't last forever. In a few weeks the local stations would start putting other songs into heavy rotation, eventually dropping "Copacabana" altogether. And like Lola, Donald and I would have to learn how to deal with a changed world that had left us behind.

It is most definitely NOT safe for work. So find someplace you can listen and watch without getting fired.

It comes to us from the seriously messed-up fine folks at the aptly-named The Web Site Is Down, so now you know who to blame for snorting milk out your nose and shorting out your wireless keyboard when you saw Sales Guy's desktop.

This is Cory "Mr. Safety" Williams' Choose-Your-Own-Adventure film in which you help him find his lost cat, Sparta. Williams has set the films up as a double challenge: 1) find the cat; 2) compete with your friends (and total strangers via YouTube comments) to find the cat in the fewest number of clicks.

This is what we expect YouTube to do: provide amusing, entertaining diversions in video format. I think it's interesting that the TV is being displaced by the Internet as the preferred method of wasting time in the Western world, as the Internet provides not only a practically infinite array of web pages to visit, but also a host of sub-domains that each provide practically limitless opportunities for time wasting (blogs, MySpace/Facebook, YouTube, porn etc.).

I liked Williams' video, and I was glad to see him acknowledge how much harder a CYOA is to create than a more traditional video. As we've seen in the video and computer game industry, any narrative with branching paths radically increases the time and energy required to produce the work. Ask any of my students who have attempted something similar -- they'll all tell you that CYOAs are a major pain in the butt. ...But they offer an interesting set of opportunities and demands for the reader/viewer/player.

One of the most familiar and frustrating of these demands is the problem of having to make choices without adequate information. How is the creator of a CYOA supposed to provide you, the r/v/p, with enough information to make an informed choice (which is not to say the right choice)? And how is the creator supposed to provide this information without making the r/v/p feel inundated with boring exposition? We're not Williams, and so we don't know Sparta's habits, nor do we know the layout of Williams' apartment or the rules of the house. Williams does a pretty good job of explaining these to us, but only after we've made a choice. I'll leave it to you to find these moments in the film -- I don't want to spoil any surprises.

CYOAs are a subject in one of the later chapters of my book, so I'll have more to say about them, and about Williams' effort, in the near future. But for now, enjoy the hunt for Sparta.

And snoring.

Gardening. The mere word can strike fear into the hearts of even the strongest and bravest among us.

I don't like gardening. I suspect it has a lot to do with my parents' technique of using yardwork as punishment for me and my brothers. In a Texas summer that can be a death sentence. Boy howdy did it ever suck.

So, while I'm not fond of gardening, when The Spouse and I moved into our lovely townhouse, it featured a front walkway that just screamed wasteland.

See? That's our door on the left. It's at the end of that long, barren strip of vegetative death and despair.

After receiving some very generous gift cards to local fave Gardener's Supply from my parents and brother and sister-in-law, The Spouse and I set to work. (No one told us plants cost so freaking much. It was a very good thing those gift cards were so generous!)

The walkway presents certain challenges to the aspiring gardener. First, one side is very shady.

The other side is not only wider (requiring different plant cover strategies), but it also gets a lot more sun, which means that you can't put the same plants on both sides. So much for symmetry!

On top of all of that, the "soil" along the side of our walkway is barely that. It's mostly large rocks and clay. This isn't a problem if you're Martha Stewart circa 1996, and have an army of minions to "turn the soil, replacing it with 3-4 feet of hand-mulched soil enriched with your garden compost -- it's a good thing." Being not thus gifted with an army of soil-servants, we did the best we could with several bags of potting soil. Good luck, little plants. You're gonna need it.

And finally, we put in some clematis which, we hope, will soon grow up the fishing-line trellis we strung up in front of the house. Though you can't see it in this picture, those little guys have really gone nuts in the past few weeks.

And the best part of all? All of the plants we "installed" (as The Spouse calls it) are perennials, which means if these suckers survive we're done! Woo-hoo!!!

First, this charming story of a much-beloved sadistic science teacher in Ohio.

Then, read this charming entry in the Conservapedia, the Wikipedia for and by conservatives.

Finally, read this charming reaction to the Conservapedia entry by Lawyers, Guns and Money's D. Make sure you read the comments -- they're choice.

And then, as a special added bonus, since I feel bad not dishing out my usual degree of meta-awareness and commentary, here's a meta-LOLCat to brighten your day.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to bake some chocolate-chip cookies while I despair for humanity. And try to figure out how to accomplish all of that branding, home-schooler-tormenting, and sexual-immorality-promoting I need to demonstrate so I can get tenure and not have to care about whether I do a good job in the classroom.

I Am Cheerios1 -- And I Am Aware of All Internet Traditions2!!!

Like other Cheerios eaters, you want to be a responsible adult. But you can't help but still be a kid at heart! You try to make good decisions. You're a clean cut, conscientious person. You're the type of person who would never skip breakfast. Part of you thinks that breakfast is too important to miss... But a bigger part of you knows it's too fun to miss!

¹ This web quiz is available here.

² For background on, and explanation of, the "I am aware of all internet traditions" internet meme, see here. For more examples, see here, and here, and here, and ...

Faithful commenter Liam rose to the challenge and did a great job. I was especially impressed with his catch of the blue-tinged holograms a la Star Wars.

But wait! There's more! I also noted the following:

• The early training sequence is strongly reminiscent of Paul Atreides' sparring session with the fighter drone from David Lynch's Dune.

• The "Flaming Energy Ball" pose is straight out of the manga/anime series Dragon Ball Z, in which it is a combat staple.
• The raptor makes me think of Ladyhawke, even though it doesn't do quite the same thing. In fact, the hawk-like bird doesn't fit at all, as it's forced to serve two narrative tropes at more or less the same time: it's both the alter-ego for our hero and a (vulture-like) symbol of the death awaiting him.

Which brings me to a great, though non-allusive sequence:

• The hawk raises its wings as if in flight (though it is clearly standing on a perch.
• Our hero bounces up and down as if riding his horse (though he is clearly standing on the ground).
• "A Gustof von Musterhausen Production" we're told in intertitle.
• Our heroine appears in a choker-shot (extreme close-up), mouthing "Oooh" -- is she impressed with the "moving" hero/heroes, or with Gustof? Who can tell? It's fabulous.

Back to the allusions.

• Liam flagged the "come hither" wave, which is a "taunt" used endlessly in anime and martial arts films. The deployment of said taunt almost always drives the enemy/ies into a mindless rage (hence the name), provoking them into charging recklessly toward the hero/heroes and thus their doom
• I could swear I've seen the car with jet rockets on its rear fenders (at 3:08 in the video) before. I thought it came from Cherry 2000 or Circuitry Man, but now I'm not sure. Any ideas?
• I truly love the shot of the camera crew visible in the mirror at 3:14.
• And I also love the irony of our hero mouthing, "No one's gonna take me alive!" at 3:51... while he's firmly and securely captured and restrained in the town stocks, soon to be pelted with manure.
• The woman in the shiny armored bikini on the unicorn is straight out of Heavy Metal.
• The sloppy licking-kiss the villain gives our heroine is Jabba's "kiss" with Princess Leah in Return of the Jedi.
• Our heroine's gallows outfit is Wilma Deering's from Buck Rodgers (go Erin Gray!).

• The motorcycle-in-the-old-west trope is the central plot point of Time Rider.
• Our hero's costume change from slimming black to not-so-slimming white plaid is reminiscent of Gandalf's reincarnation/return as Gandalf the White in Lord of the Rings.
• And finally, the Zoro mask our hero wears upon his return... speaks for itself, and yet makes no sense whatsoever.

Whew! I'm exhausted. What did I miss?

But then I was catching up on some long-overdue blog reading last night and I learned that our good friends Sster and Attic Man (their noms de blog) have become victims of the Midwest flooding.

I mentioned our local paper yesterday, the Free Press, which published this picture (from the news wires, naturally):

The Spouse noticed it first, doing a double take on the grainy black-and-white picture of houses that had floated downstream like flotsam and jetsam, washed up against a bridge trestle. Turns out that Sster and Attic Man's house in Cedar Rapids is very near that bridge. They haven't been allowed back to their house yet, so no one really knows what's going on and how bad the damage is. If you know Sster and Attic Man, check out Sster's blog and zing them an e-mail of support.

But, because life goes on, and because thinking about flood victims half the country away who you can't do anything for at the moment is a sure recipe for depression, I guess we should look at a few of the outrageous cars.

First up is a video from BMW's new GINA project:

I especially liked this bit from Chris Bangle: "Emotion is really the added value to this. I mean, one way is saying you get better function or you get better alternative ways of doing things... but really we want to achieve a higher emotional plane out of this." Because when I first watched the video, I had a number of OMG! moments.

Having owned a convertible, I'm extremely hesitant about the GINA's road handling, though. Even tightly-stretched and clamped down convertible roofs flap and flutter in the wind as you drive the car with the top up. I'm left wondering how the GINA's skin will react to speed and atmosphere, especially with the split hood (which is incredibly cool).

The Spouse sent me this link to a Yahoo story about outrageous cars, and many of them are very cool. But one in particular caught my attention, and it wasn't even included as a picture in the article! (Bad, lazy Yahoo!) Here's the Jeep Renegade:

If you've ever played the game Halo, you recognize this as a blatant rip-off of the Warthog vehicle from the game (minus the chain gun, of course).

But while looking for the Jeep, I came across this concept car from Volkswagen, and I think it's a much cooler variation on the same theme:

And so, as gas prices head for the $6 mark, and as our friends try to figure out what to do now that their living room has become a sewage-filled aquarium, we can at least dream about better times and better, cooler cars.

(I'm still waiting, however, for the flying cars I was promised we'd have by the year 2000.)

My not-so-secret shame has been getting a real workout with the all-Coldplay-all-the-time media blitz surrounding their new album. We were in England Outer Space when the first single, "Violet Hill" launched, and we got to hear it nonstop on BBC 1, 2, 3, 4, and Cymru. And it wasn't bad. So, yes, I downloaded it from the band's web page when we got back. It was free. Sue me.

Then the title track from the album, "Viva La Vida," launched. I really liked it. And then I started down that slippery slope of musical turpitude that ends with me buying the album... which hasn't happened yet, but it seems only a matter of time.

But then The Spouse noticed that Dr. Atrios over at Eschaton had dropped this bombshell:

Wow. The new Coldplay song, Viva la Vida, really is a Buggles ripoff. I hope Chris Martin at least wears the trademark specs when he sings.

(If, like me, "Buggles" rang a few bells, but nothing really came to mind, it may make you feel better to re-learn that Buggles (no definite article) were the New Wave band behind the first video broadcast on MTV: "Video Killed the Radio Star." So now you know.)

Personally, I don't really hear it. But beyond "VKtRS," I'm not a Buggles aficionado. More's the pity, I suppose, given my love of all things New Wave. But I digress...

And then, to make matters worse, I spot this video over on the Viral Video Chart:

Now I don't know what to believe! But it seems that Mr. Gwenyth Paltrow has some explaining to do.

And speaking of having some explaining to do, WTF is up with the Associated Press? The New York Times explains:

Last week, The A.P. took an unusually strict position against quotation of its work, sending a letter to the Drudge Retort asking it to remove seven items that contained quotations from A.P. articles ranging from 39 to 79 words.

The AP position is that quoting from AP articles in a blog post is stealing from the AP, which sells its articles to newspapers for reprinting. Unfortunately, the AP here runs seriously afoul of the Fair Use doctrine, a problem noticed immediately by a huge number of prominent bloggers across the political spectrum. (For a good rundown of some of the heavy hitters weighing in on this, check out Cernig's post at Newshoggers.)

There is, of course, a boycott of AP now, as bloggers attempt to show the AP exactly what it is that quoting from them and linking to newspaper sites that publish them does for those newspapers. (Hint: it increases their number of page views, which increases their advertising fees, which increases their profits, which increases the demand for AP articles. Pretty neat, huh?) Well, not any more.

This is a real problem for me, and has been for a while, frankly. Not because I deeply want to steal from the AP (I don't), nor because I'm especially angry that the AP is trying to steal the right of Fair Use away from online writers (they can't). It's a problem because here in bucolic Vermont our local paper is positively filled with articles from the AP. In today's Burlington Free Press, for instance, the front page section included 26 articles from the AP. There were 4 articles from Free Press reporters.

I read the local paper every day and the New York Times on Sundays. If I want to share with you or anyone an article I read in the paper, I have an 87% chance of running into the AP news blockade. And I'm not talking about the boycott -- the Free Press doesn't put AP articles on their web page. That means that if I want to post a link to an article, or print it out for my students, I have to try to track down another newspaper somewhere that also ran the story and print it out from something like the DesMoines Register or the Dallas Morning News. Ugh!

The downtime has been lovely, but as part of the new workplan I'm going to be posting something short each and every day to keep the writing mojo flowing.

So, to kick things off, a veritable potpourri of interesting, thought-provoking, and wiinsome (sic) stuff. And, as the title indicates, it's not a random collection of stuff because it's numbered!

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1) Wii now have a Nintendo Wii! Oui, c'est vrai. And we even have a few games for it that allow online play with other proud Wiiple. At present, we have MarioKart Wii, Endless Ocean, and Trauma Center: New Blood. So, if you've got a Wii, and one or more of those games, too, zing me an e-mail so wii can exchange super-secret and highly irritating Wii-codes, which will then allow us to enter those codes into our Wii systems thus unlocking online play on a game-by-game basis. (Yes, the process seems to be exactly that tedious.)

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2) With all of the gay marriage going on in Massachusetts, and now in California and New York (though New York took the easy way out by recognizing gay marriages without performing them), I imagine straight, married people around the country must be reduced to quivering piles of lime-green jello as they await the inevitable dissolution of their own marriages. As we've been told time and again by the "marriage is a straights-only club" members, gay marriage is the final straw that will break the (straight) marriage camel's back. And now, via AmericaBlog, we have proof:

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3) Somebody, somewhere, posted a link to this Talking Jesus Doll (I kid you not), and I haven't been able to get the darn thing out of mind for days now.

It's not that I'm particularly religious... I'm not. I just think Talking Jesus is kinda hot. I really appreciate it when "toy" companies put in the time and energy it takes to make Talking Jesus an attractive Caucasian guy with flawless hair and a reassuringly upper Midwestern newscaster accent (i.e., the accent most Americans can't hear as an accent).

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4) While I was poking around, looking for the original link to Talking Jesus, I found this on BoingBoing, a link to t-shirt designs refuting one of the primary arguments of Creationism/So-Called "Intelligent" Design"

See, the Creationists argue that you don't have to teach Creationism, per se in science classes, just teach "the controversy" over evolution, which would require teaching Creationism and/or "Intelligent" Design. Of course, among scientists there really is no controversy. Evolution is accepted as the paradigm for the appearance and development of life on earth. And yet they try to weasel religion in any way they can. (Goodness, this is becoming quite the theological post, isn't it?)

I bring this up in part because I like the shirt designs, and partly because I have an editorial cartoon on my office door that makes the same points with astrology, alchemy, phrenology, and other pseudo-sciences. But these are wearable. Cool.

Neither did I. But as I was walking to my office this morning I noticed that the flags were at half-staff. So, I asked the helpful information desk attendant at our new $50+ million dollar student/conference center why the flags were lowered. She didn't know, but she went back into the main operations office and asked someone who might.

If you've ever played the game of "Telephone," you may have an inkling of what's coming up.

When she returned, she solemnly told me that there was a Presidential Proclamation declaring that all flags should be lowered to half-staff today to celebrate the National Peace Memorial.

I am not making this up. Once I processed what she'd said, I was indignant that the President would "celebrate" peace with the international symbol for state mourning, but I thanked the attendant for checking into it for me and walked away in a bit of a huff.

Then, once at my office, I pulled up Google and started searching for what was really going on.

So, we have two things to be thankful for: 1) the dedication and sacrifice of our police officers; and 2) that our President didn't attempt to force us all to mourn the promise of peace.

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Our friend Attic Man sent us this news report, which is a little late now, but it was timely when he sent it. And though Obama didn't actually win everywhere in the Pennsylvania primary election, it continues to illustrate the divide between election coolness and un-coolness. Notice the band, Earl Pickens and the Band Named Thunder (a pretty cool name) is pretty cool. Notice the Obama supporters dancing in the video... are not.

From a mass media and electioneering standpoint I think this is perfect. It attaches coolness to the campaign without alienating all of the dorky wanna-be supporters out there who may feel not nearly cool enough to vote with all of the pretty celebrities in the other videos. (Much like the Lipton commercials playing before films now that ask if you're "young enough" to drink their white tea. I suspect that many iced tea drinkers are not.)

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Regulatory oversight and control of abusive commercial practices is cool. While in England outer space, The Spouse and I heard BBC reports of the European Union's impending action against British cell phone providers. Last year, when we were in Scotland, the big news was that this same agency was about to force cell phone providers in the UK to stop charging outrageous fees for calls made from other EU countries. For instance, if you lived in Dover, England and took the hovercraft over to Calais, France, calling your mum at home would have become 10-100 times more expensive than if you'd called her from Belfast, Northern Ireland, even though Belfast is much farther away.

Well, the cell phone companies complied, but refused to change their texting rates. So, now a call from Calais to Dover costs less than texting her: "hi mum, home @ 9." Now the EU regulators are going after texting charges, with action promised this summer. Imagine how cool it would be to live in a place where the government (or at least parts of it) care more about you than they do about Verizon Wireless! Cool.

Boing Boing adds fuel to the fire by reporting that we pay more per megabyte of data for even normal-costing text messages than NASA pays to get pictures of the Crab Nebula!

Now that's not cool.

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Design Observer wants us to think about how cool tables of contents can be, with 30 beautiful ToCs.

Above: ToC #27, from The Thinking Eye: The Notebooks of Paul Klee. Jürg Spiller, ed. George Wittenborn, 1961.

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A former student (hi J!) sent me this article from the New York Times about sports blogging, which raises a number of cool questions. As Times reporter Tim Arango writes, "At the heart of the issue, which people on both sides alternately describe as a commercial dispute and a First Amendment fight, is a simple question: Who owns sports coverage?" Interestingly, this isn't a fight between bloggers and mainstream, establishment media organizations. In this conflict mainstream and popular media are aligned against the sports organizations who want to control not only the sports event, but also what can be said and shown about the sports event.

Mike Fannin identifies one of the key issues:

Ten years ago newspapers weren’t in the world of video and audio,” [Mike Fannin, president of the Associated Press Sports Editors and the managing editor for sports and features at the Kansas City Star] said. “We were in the world of print. The leagues don’t have a print product. Their view of this is that we entered their world.

As the mainstream print media (newspapers and magazines) become increasingly digital, their coverage becomes, of course, increasingly multimodal. And suddenly what they're doing looks a lot like what the television networks pay millions of dollars each year to broadcast.

Not only that, but the digital coverage provided by the establishment "print" media increasingly comes to resemble what bloggers do. And if bloggers are already doing it, and if some of them are doing it much better than the establishment writers, what's to stop bloggers from increasing their coverage? Well, the team owners, for one. Except when they're stopped, that is.

Last month [Dallas Mavericks owner Mark] Cuban sought to ban bloggers from the Mavericks’ locker room, but the National Basketball Association intervened, ruling that bloggers from credentialed news organizations must be admitted.

Mr. Cuban then decided to let in any blogger — "someone on Blogspot who has been posting for a couple weeks, kids blogging for their middle school Web site or those that work for big companies."

It's a petulant response, but one that has precedent in other venues. In 2004 the national election conventions both had a large and active corps of citizen bloggers who were given "press/media" credentials and access to the events. Why not sports events? And if this does catch on in professional sports, you can expect many, many of my future posts (especially during spring training and the fall/winter season) to be coming to you from the New England Patriots locker room. Everyone wins.

Except for the athletes, who are suddenly having to face the fact that with the democritization of publishing that blogging and online communication presents, everyone and anyone around them could be a blogger, and anything and everything they say could end up "in print" around the world.

“It’s a new world,” said Jason Zillo, the head of media relations for the Yankees, surveying the team taking batting practice. “We spend a lot of time in spring training on media training.

It's not just professional sports, either, that's getting into the "who owns sports coverage" game.

The limits of coverage is a hot issue in athletics at the college level as well. The National Collegiate Athletic Association issued new guidelines this year: in women’s water polo, bloggers are allowed three posts a quarter and one at halftime; in fencing or bowling, 10 posts are allowed for each day or session.

“I think we’re hitting the ridiculous button here,” said John Cherwa, chair of the legal affairs committee for the Associated Press Sports Editors and the sports projects editor at The Orlando Sentinel. “We’re getting tired of everyone trying to tell us how to do our business.”

Damn right you are, John Cherwa. For the uninitiated, what the NCAA is trying to do with these restrictions is to prevent "liveblogging" college sports events, the practice of writing a continuously updated stream of reportage and reflection during an event. Luckily for Cherwa, that horse is already out of the barn. With mobile and ubiquitous computing, and the microminiaturization of increasingly powerful computers means that just about anyone at any event could be liveblogging and most people would never know.

Many cool and uncool things here to ponder...