All posts by James

About James

James Seidler is a writer living in Chicago. The editor for the now-defunct humor publication FLYMF, he has now decided to maintain his web presence and smart remarks through this blog.

Which One’s Monty?

Movies

The Onion A.V. Club has an interview with John Cleese where he reminisces about his career, Monty Python, and the current state of comedy filmmaking. He comes off as warm, perceptive, and genuinely funny.

The Life of Brian inspires a detour into theology, which is where Cleese drops a nice quote:

Here’s what I think in a single sentence: I think that the real religion is about the understanding that if we can only still our egos for a few seconds, we might have a chance of experiencing something that is divine in nature. But in order to do that, we have to slice away at our egos and try to get them down to a manageable size, and then still work some practiced light meditation. So real religion is about reducing our egos, whereas all the churches are interested in is egotistical activities, like getting as many members and raising as much money and becoming as important and high-profile and influential as possible. All of which are egotistical attitudes. So how can you have an egotistical organization trying to teach a non-egotistical ideal? It makes no sense, unless you regard religion as crowd control. What I think most organized religion—simply crowd control.

That’s a bumper sticker waiting to be made. I can see the steeple graphic already.

Not Quite Invincible

Books

Austin Grossman’s novel, “Soon I Will Be Invincible,” is a prose distillation of the world of superheroes, taking the heavy hitters, absurd plot twists, and insane plans of comic book lore and condensing them into a single narrative. Extradimensional energies and stray magic wands bestow powers and take them away; a supervillain endeavors to pull the planet out of orbit; and Batman, Wonder Woman, Doctor Strange and Superman all weigh in via slightly flawed homologues.

Grossman offers an internalization of the medium, one that’s hard to achieve on the illustrated page. Half of the proceedings—the better half—is dedicated to Lex Luthor stand-in Dr. Impossible rationalizing his motivations as he walks us through his latest evil scheme, assuring us, constantly, of his genius. “I often wonder what Einstein would have done in my position,” he ponders at one point. “Einstein was smart, maybe even as smart as Laserator, but he played it way too safe. Then again, nobody even threw a grappling hook at Einstein.”

Continue reading Not Quite Invincible →

Would You Want Your Daughter Dating a Canadian?

Well Worth Reading

In what passes for ingenuity among yokels, southern racists have discovered a new stratagem for camouflaging their dislike of black people. Instead of using the slurs mostly commonly associated with bigotry (you know what they are), rednecks have taken to calling the irrational objects of their ire “Canadians” instead.

As Toronto’s National Post—an interested party—reports, “‘Canadian’ has apparently become a code word for blacks among American racists.” The practice dates as far back as 2003, when Mike Trent, a district attorney in Houston, sent an e-mail bemoaning “some Canadians on the jury feeling sorry for the defendant.” (Amazingly, Trent maintains that he was unaware his comments carried any racial connotations, stating, “It would not be impossible or unusual for people from other countries to be on our juries.”)

For this laughable act of backtracking, I nominate him for the 2008 “But Some of My Best Friends Are Black” Award. But I also thank him, and his racist peers, for alerting me to this piece of racist code.

I would warn them, however, that they run the risk of “crossing the streams” with their slurs. Given the effort the right has dedicated to making “Canadian” synonymous with “waiting list” and “delayed knee-replacement-related fatalities,” they might be courting confusion among their base with this new formulation. Imagine the embarrassment of the politician who thinks he’s delivering a knock on “socialized” health care only to have his audience hear him blowing the dog-whistle of “welfare queens” instead.

The Flatulent Fuhrer

Well Worth Reading

Beyond his totalitarian rages and murderous anti-Semitism, Hitler was apparently an unpleasant guy to be around. As MoreIntelligentLife.com reports,

“Medical historians are unanimous that Adolf was the victim of uncontrollable flatulence…his private physician, Dr. Theo Morell, recorded in his diary that after Hitler downed a typical vegetable platter, “constipation and colossal flatulence occurred on a scale I have seldom encountered before.”

His digestive problems were a lifelong problem, worsening as he aged, but they also may have represented an instance where the cure was worse than the disease. The article states that his physician prescribed pills for the disorder containing strychnine and atropine, compounds contributing to vicious mood swings. He also administered daily amphetamine injections, cocaine eyedrops and pills derived from ground bull testicles.

German intelligence went as far as to wonder whether the doctor was a spy, but the historical record seems to support the notion that he was just an idiot. It’s hard to think of a more fitting victim for malpractice.

At the same time, it’s also tempting to wonder how much of the madness at the end of World War II was inspired by a raving, drug-fueled mania, as opposed to the alternative, a monstrous, sober mania. Some combination of the two is probably where the truth lies.