Tired. Synchronicity of the night: “Hey, what’s Leon Marr’s name doing on that mailbox?” “Oh, he’s in California.”

“Why is there a Mashup there?” “I’ll tell you later.” This entry, by the by, will probably not become a googlewhack (original), but only cause all of you are gonna use “Buckaroo” and “mashup” on your pages. C’est la vie. Where was I… ah, yes. Mashup #21 is Buckaroo Banzai, goofy flagbearer of 80s sci-fi pulp. All the men want to be Buckaroo Banzai, and all the women want to look at him misty-eyed across the floor of Artie’s Artery. The movie is really a revamp of Doc Savage; you’ve got the mysterious ultra-competent leader and his henchmen, each of whom has a different specialty. If you dial down and focus on the movie’s plot, you’ve got a fairly standard alien invasion plot mixed with a kind of a pod people riff and some multiple dimension stuff which doesn’t entirely matter. More important, though, is the deranged hipness which permeates the entire thing. You could say that Buckaroo Banzai is a mashup itself: Doc Savage plus 80s style. You wouldn’t be far wrong.

Phil Carter notes new rules for military tribunals (original) (PDF), including a right of review, and does a far better job of analyzing them than I would. So go read him (original).

Hey, look: more right-wing cop-killers (original). But remember, it’s the left which is the problem. Arthur Bixby is just another exception. Edit: I’m going to expand on this, because I jotted it off a bit too quickly. If you look at Bixby’s history (original), you’ve got a pretty iconoclastic guy who doesn’t respect the legitimacy of the United States government. The problem is the violence. The other problem is the strange alternative government people like Bixby make up. Being an anarchist is one thing; inventing new rules and expecting people to live under them is another. ...

Anita Mui, one of my favorite Hong Kong stars, died today (original). I guess she was better known for her singing, but I really admired her acting. I first saw her in My Father Is a Hero, but she was also pretty special in Heroic Trio, Executioners, and Drunken Master II. This makes me sad.

John Clute’s review of the new Heinlein novel is great reading. It makes me want to read the book, which was somewhat unlikely given that I’m not so fond of posthumous literary exhumations. It also takes down Spider Robinson about as nicely as you’ll ever see it done.

Distributed Proofreaders is one of those cool things enabled by the Internet. Project Gutenberg has the problem that proofreading OCRed books is painfully time-consuming. So what do you do? You farm out the proofreading one page at a time. It takes a few minutes to proofread a single page; you do five, and you’ve made a difference. Come back the next day and do five more. At the moment, Distributed Proofreaders has provided over 25% of Project Gutenberg’s 10,000 books. It’s neat. Plus I got to proof some James Branch Cabell — in fact, I just proofed the last page of The Eagle’s Shadow. ...

Truth is, I don’t much care what Dean supporters will do if he loses the primaries (original). I think Dean’s veiled threats are pretty childish; they’re also stupid. He’s not gonna tell his supporters to stay home, and the vast majority of them will vote for the Democratic nominee anyhow. I also agree with Atrios on this one, in that the real question is what happens to Dean’s campaign machine. In the ideal Democratic Party world, he keeps running it on behalf of the primary victor. In our world, he probably tunes it down and keeps it humming so as to keep himself well-positioned for 2008/2012, unless of course he gets the VP nod, which is what he’s angling for when he makes threats about taking his toys and going home. ...

WISH 78 (original) asks: Do you think allowing one player to play more than one character in a game is a good or bad idea? Does the style of the game make any difference? What about the format (FTF, PBeM, etc.)? Well, you wouldn’t want multiple characters in a LARP, I imagine. (I joke!) I think that playing two equal characters face to face is generally a bad idea. I was in a game recently in which everyone had two players, and while I enjoyed the game, I gotta say I would have enjoyed it more if I’d been able to focus on one PC. If you’re playing in a purely tactical game, it perhaps makes more sense, but I like exploring personalities. ...

About Cheaper by the Dozen: Roger Ebert (original) is wrong, and pretty clearly wasn’t paying close attention to the movie anyhow, since he has a couple of factual errors in his review. So, no, it’s not a three star movie. 1.5 stars, maybe. Not funny, not charming, kind of depressing. Me, I like my cheerful uplifting Christmas movies to be about success rather than failure.