We were trying to steal a goose from the casino

[alexsarll]

In the olden days, especially in the US, sitcoms would often be named for their star - The Mary Tyler Moore Show, for instance. In later years, this formula was contracted but not lost; consider Roseanne or Ellen, where again the focus is on a fictionalised version of the lead.
Having seen Dylan Moran's stand up DVD Monster last night, I can't see why Black Books wasn't just called The Dylan Moran Show (it would have to be the old version of the formula because Dylan would just cause confusion).

Anyone whose only news source is Metro: Stan Lee wasn't the artist who created Spider-Man, he was the writer. And that's for a given, very limited, value of 'writer'. Given how bad his prose is, I dread to think what his doodles look like. The artist (one of several whose limelight Stan seems happy to hog when it comes to Marvel's history) was noted right wing nutter Steve Ditko.

Titan has rivers of methane. Stinky! I always thought Titan was our best chance of finding life. I mean, I'm not expecting anything with which we can have a conversation but even a slime-mold would be fvcking amazing.

Comments

[perfectlyvague.livejournal.com]

Stuart (Stewart) Lee is interviewing Alan Moore on Radio 4 next Thursday night at 6.30...I guess you already know, but yes.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Indeed I do, thank you. That was the one whose recording I attended; the week after, Moore interviews Eno.

Thursdays on R4 are great at the moment; they also have Mark Gatiss and Paul Putner in Nebulous.

[perfectlyvague.livejournal.com]

Yes - I had a feeling that you had been there but wasn't sure. I keep missing Nebulous although the bits I have heard have been glorious...my connection at home is too clunky to do listen again...

[gregjames.livejournal.com]

"right wing nutter Steve Ditko"

Pesky t. One letter away from being amusing.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

If you ever see an interview with him, he's amusing in a whole different way.

[gregjames.livejournal.com]

Is he in John McCrirrick fruitloop territory or somewhere special all his own?

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

More Ayn Rand than Daily Mail.

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

Titan? Not Europa then?

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

1) I think Europa started making a name for itself after my first flush of astronomical enthusiasm had faded.
2) For political reasons, I prefer to think that the life will come from somewhere whose name would reflect less glory on the EU.

[beingjdc.livejournal.com]

Well yes, but isn't the Titan exploration a European Space Agency project, whereas NASA are looking at Europa (irony)...

Surface image of Europa.

Another one

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Curse their cunning schemes! If only we had Batman on our side...

[p-dan-tic.livejournal.com]

when I saw monster I thought it was about charleen theron being a murdering hoar, I didn't realise dylan ment ot to be funny....

yet another joke goes over daniel's head

:(

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

When I first heard about that Monster, I thought "Ace! Charlize Theron and Christina Ricci play lesbian serial killers! OK, it's based on a true story in which the killer was Yours, but they're sure to Hollywood it up!"
And then the b@st@rds went and did an authentic adaptation. Bah.

[p-dan-tic.livejournal.com]

yes but christian ricci hasn't looked so good since the opposite of sex

[my-name-is-anna.livejournal.com]

wow - that is amazing! methane rivers.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

...which could also be the name of an American businesswoman, couldn't it?

"Methane Rivers, senior VP of Omnicorp'

[my-name-is-anna.livejournal.com]

there are 6 billion people in the world, someone somewhere must have that name.

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

Methane is odourless, so your dreams of a stinkfree life as a slimemould on Titan could still be fulfilled.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

So Titan won't actually smell of farts, then?

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

Nope!

[my-name-is-anna.livejournal.com]

i thought it was the methane in farts which gave them their smell?
and in cowpats etc...

[boyofbadgers.livejournal.com]

Nah. The smell of farts comes from a variety of sulphurous compounds produced in the gut. Hence their odour sometimes being a bit eggy. Natural gas only smells because they put special stinking agents in it for leak detection purposes.

[my-name-is-anna.livejournal.com]

oh, i see - it is the sulphur, not the methane?

[jamesward.livejournal.com]

Not until you get there Bazza.

[verlaine.livejournal.com]

Me and strange_powers have almost come to blows about whether Stan Lee is a genius or not. I incline to the opinion that he's a borderline imbecile who got very, very lucky, you see.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Consider Stan's near contemporary Terry Nation; he came up with a rough description of the Daleks, but most of the credit must go to their designer (whose name, shamefully, escapes me). He wrote several stories featuring said Daleks, but while they had moments of brilliance they contradicted each other, and in later work others used his creations far better than he ever did.
Neither Stan nor Terry deserves as much credit as they've received; each had a couple of very good ideas arrive in an otherwise mediocre brain.
But Stan's writing is vastly worse than Terry's.

[verlaine.livejournal.com]

Ray Cusick, I believe. Yes, the analogy is excellent - if you asked me who I had more contempt for, Stan or Terry, I'd have to go with Terry: thirty years of taking credit for other people's good ideas (Blake's 7 would have been NOTHING without the contribution of Chris Boucher), and even worse behaving like an arse over rights and money at every possible opportunity. We're lucky that Terry Nation is dead really, I'm sure that's the only reason we're going to get Daleks in the new series.

Mind you Stan Lee seems to be going that way too, if he's now taking people to court for not giving him his rightful cut ON TOP OF A $530,000 SALARY FOR 15 HOURS WORK A WEEK.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

While there are undoubtedly some dodgy lines in Nation's Who work, I can still watch those stories for pleasure and don't cringe at Every. Single. Line. of the Dialogue as I do with Stan's comics.

And while Nation's rewriting of history stinks, is it really any worse than the way Stan has worked things so that Kirby and Ditko are never mentioned outside fan circles? And Lee makes the amounts you mention while Ditko is, by all accounts, pretty close to the breadline?

As regards the Daleks in the new series - part of me would have been happier without them, given the Nation estate seem to consider John "Not That One" Peel the custodian of them, and his War of the Daleks was quite atrociously bad.

[verlaine.livejournal.com]

I can still watch those stories for pleasure

God bless script editors, that's all I can say. Terry Nation's good Who stories all coincide with a really good person in the SE seat: would Genesis have been any good if it hadn't been for Robert Holmes' watchful influence? Whereas check out some of the rubbish that Nation turned out in lesser eras: The Keys of Marinus, The Chase, Planet, Death, Destiny...

My favourite Stan Lee moment was, as it happens, the only good thing on the Daredevil DVD, in the extras. First of all there was an interview with Stan Lee, congratulating himself for having invented the character. "We didn't realise it at first, but after a few issues we knew we really had something here! And we were right, the character's going strong all these years later." Immediately followed by an interview with Frank Miller: "And I decided to take on this ludicrous lame duck character that everyone in Marvel was excruciatingly embarrassed by, and after chopping away pretty much everything that the original creators had defined we finally managed to make something that worked." ;)

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

It's especially noticeable if you read the issues where Miller starts on art only, where DD is just a particularly lame Avengers hanger-on.
Though in some of the later issues you do feel he'd really rather be writing Batman.

And I prefer Marinus to Genesis. Mainly for the classic Hartnellism "Mmmm! And if you'd have had your shoes on, m'boy, you could have given her hers!"