I’m struck with a sudden desire to watch the old Adam West/Burt Ward “Batman.” The TV episodes haven’t made it onto DVD (legal fun - Wikipedia has a nice summary) but the MOVIE sure did! And I’ve got it right here - shark repellant batspray, (Lee Meriwether (not Julie Newmar or Eartha Kitt) and all. So I think I’ll watch that tonight.

To counter last night’s sad sack of a post, allow me to share some entertaining things. Rightfully, and to match the taxonomy and structure I’ve set forth thus far, this post should be called, “Easily Entertained, volume #” - but nah. I like the Riddler reference a bit better. So, here’s some random stuff:

• One of my favorite enjoyable fun reads (that is to day, not horribly mentally taxing, but definitely not a waste of your time) from Mr. Neil Gaiman is up on the internets for free for one month. THIRTY DAYS. You can download the PDF and read it. He and his publisher (HarperCollins) did this a few months back with another one of his books and saw a bit of a jump in sales, esp. in independent bookstores, if I recall correctly. This time, it’s his book Neverwhere. So… check it out if you’d like to read a bit of non-dragon fantasy fiction about London and people and relationships and puns. It’s one of those books I could read over and over again. Just fun.

• If you’re in the northern New Jersey area and have access to a car and are craving some delicious diner food, by all means get yourself over to Tops Diner in East Newark, NJ. I went after work tonight with a friend from work and we stuffed ourselves silly… after spending about 15 minutes just staring at the menu. I must reiterate that my heart belongs to the Tick-Tock diner. They’ve got the sweet potato fries, the strangely surly service and shiny chrome that gives it authentic Jersey diner flair… but Tops Diner is surprisingly upscale (I use the term in the diner sense), offering things like eggs Benedict with crab cakes instead of Canadian bacon. The decor is more modern and sleeker, and the menu is twice as expansive. So, yeah. Consider it for your next northern NJ diner run.
• The Shape of Song. This is just geeky fun. The structure of songs is such that elements repeat - choruses, motifs, etc. This site provides a visual representation of various songs submitted - check out the simplicity of the well-known X-Files theme song by Mark Snow, the minimal roadbumps of Nine Inch Nails’ Closer, anything from Radiohead and Pachelbel’s canon. Pretty.
  

  The diagrams in The Shape of Song display musical form as a sequence of translucent arches. Each arch connects two repeated, identical passages of a composition. By using repeated passages as signposts, the diagram illustrates the deep structure of the composition.

• My Moo stickerbook arrived yesterday (@ right). Moo is a UK-based company who’s partnered with Flickr to create these cute little sticker books from your Flickr photostream. You select a bunch of photos and they print them up in a cute match-book style sticker book. I was like a little kid when I got the envelope. I’m all excited about where to put my new stickers.
• Quick Sarah Palin round-up. I’m not watching the speech tonight (no cable) and I don’t want to listen, so I’ll hear all about it tomorrow morning on NPR. In the meantime, here are some posts I’ve found interesting (and/or entertaining): (1) What a librarian has to say about Mrs. Palin, (2) a post from This Recording which I should not even try to describe, (3) a piece from an Alaska native in The New Republic called, “Palin? Really?” (4) a little piece about Palin’s kids’ names (5) and something a bit less tabloid-ey from the NYT. There’s tons more, but that would just feel wrong.
• It’s going to be almost 90 degrees in NJ tomorrow and Friday - and raining on Friday and Saturday. I want fall to get here already. I want more than just the falling leaves with their colors changing (which is sort of happening already) but also the cool weather. That’s what I want. I also wanted to find and post a clip from the Family Guy episode with the leafers descending upon Rhode Island, but I couldn’t find it on YouTube or Hulu. Oh well.

Hint: it’s #5.

Thank you, CNN.com, for giving me a reason to dislike society just a little bit more today.

This morning’s New York Times contained a piece about the lack of dental care in Kentucky (and some surrounding states). While we may be aware of the statistics about the lack of health care in the US, I think we often sort of subsume that awareness while we’re worrying about our own co-pays, premiums and plans. Some of the anecdotes and statistics in this article are a bit jarring:

About 1 in 10 state residents are missing all their teeth, according to 2004 federal data.

At his private practice, Dr. Smith said that at least once a month he sees a patient who has used Krazy Glue to reattach a broken tooth to the root or to an adjacent tooth… patients who have tried to avoid the cost of a dentist by swishing with rubbing alcohol to deal with a tooth infection or by rubbing crushed aspirin pills on gums to numb pain. Both tactics worsen the situation by burning the gums and creating ulcers, he said.

[...] His teeth crooked and blackened, Justin Baker is the face of another reason for Kentucky’s oral hygiene problems: methamphetamine use. “They just rotted,” Mr. Baker, 16, said about the damage done in less than a year of drug use.

Yes, meth use and lack of knowledge are separate problems, but they’re only perpetuated by the health care system. Medicaid reimbursement to dentists in the state is so low that less than a quarter of them accept it, and the only option available to someone with a severely infected tooth is to have it pulled. Medicaid doesn’t pay for a root canal or dentures. Medicare doesn’t cover dental at all. Why would you go see a dentist if you know he won’t be able to help you because you don’t have the money or insurance, or if your only option even with insurance will be to get your teeth pulled?

“Try finding work when you’re in your 30s or 40s and you’re missing front teeth,” said Jane Stephenson, founder of the New Opportunity School in Berea, Ky., which provides job training to low-income Appalachian women.

I once had a co-worker who was missing several of her front teeth (don’t know how/why). She was going to night classes, etc. trying to improve her skills and get beyond answering phones for the company we worked for. She was quite aware that her appearance was holding her back and wanted to have her teeth fixed. The company had insurance (however crappy, it was better than nothing), but the fear of seeing a dentist after so many years of not caring for her teeth - and the fear that she would not have money to cover her portion of the procedures - was paralyzing. Lots of people have fear of the dentist, but this was something different - there was shame for having ignored that aspect of her own health.

I’d like to think we all do what we can for people who might need our help - whether it’s holding the door open for someone struggling with a stroller or carrying many bags, cooking dinner for a busy friend, donating blood (because it’s always needed), participating in food or clothing drives, simply sending money to an organization that needs it, babysitting for friends/family when they need a night off, or volunteering your time (if that’s what you’ve got more of than money) to help other people in some way.

But what do you do when something like this is the problem? How do we help when the government systems that are supposed to help people who aren’t in the right area to get cushy jobs with full benefits, or who are self-employed and can’t afford the high cost of insurance, are a huge part of the problem? Or when we’re looking at generations of people who have been going about it their own way, however detrimental that is to their health - a legacy of ignorance? Yes, you can provide more money for people working to fix it - like Dr. Smith in the article - but that’s a Band-Aid, isn’t it?

Last night, I caught a few minutes of Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone on ABC Family (background noise while I was eating dinner - my other options were Sex and the City or How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days). During the transition to commercial, Mr. Announcer pronounced that Harry Potter was part of their special “25 Days of Christmas” programming, brought to us by New Line Cinema’s The Golden Compass.

There’s something quite hilarious and more than a little contradictory about that. ABC Family is touting the fact that Harry Potter (a movie and book series quite heavily criticized by religious groups) is part of their Christmas programming. That heathen, Harry, is sponsored by The Golden Compass, which right now is garnering all kinds of attention because The Catholic League and Focus on the Family (among others) are calling for a boycott of the movie for its anti-religious basis.

For those who aren’t familiar with the books or the movie, here’s some basic info. Philip Pullman wrote a trilogy of childrens’ books (not young children - young adult/intermediate fiction is more appropriate) collectively entitled, His Dark Materials. That title comes from Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost, about the Fall (of Adam and Eve, and the rebellion of the angels led by Satan). The specific quote is:

Into this wilde Abyss,
The Womb of nature and perhaps her Grave,
Of neither Sea, nor Shore, nor Air, nor Fire,
But all these in thir pregnant causes mixt
Confus’dly, and which thus must ever fight,
Unless th’ Almighty Maker them ordain
His dark materials to create more Worlds,
Into this wilde Abyss the warie fiend
Stood on the brink of Hell and look’d a while,
Pondering his Voyage; for no narrow frith
He had to cross.

The books in the trilogy are The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass, and they center around a pre-teen orphan girl named Lyra who is living and attending a boarding school in a sort of alternate universe Oxford. The college is run by a religious order known as the Magisterium - they’re quickly revealed to be corrupt and working on an evil project based in some crazy fundamentalist-like beliefs. I don’t want to belabor with details but, essentially, it turns out that our heroine is a child born out of wedlock (gasp!) and the evil agenda involves separating children from their souls (which are corporeal in this universe and take on animal forms) before they reach puberty.

Hanna Rosin, in The Atlantic Monthly, wrote a great piece about the movie called, “How Hollywood Saved God.” The full article is available only to subscribers (hi!) but here are some of the more interesting segments. Rosin interviewed Philip Pullman and spoke to him about how the studio has sterilized the movie and removed basically all the edgy religious elements:

In discussing the film, he chose his words carefully, acknowledging that his role now is to be “sensible” so that the next two films get made. Nonetheless, he was honest about what was missing: “They do know where to put the theology,” he said, “and that’s off the film.”

Long silence. Then, “I think if everything that is made explicit in the book or everything that is implied clearly in the book or everything that can be understood by a close reading of the book were present in the film, they’d have the biggest hit they’ve ever had in their lives. If they allowed the religious meaning of the book to be fully explicit, it would be a huge hit. Suddenly, they’d have letters of appreciation from people who felt this but never dared say it. They would be the heroes of liberal thought, of freedom of thought … And it would be the greatest pity if that didn’t happen.

I didn’t put that very well. What I mean is that I want this film to succeed in every possible way. And what I don’t want to do, you see, is talk the other two films out of existence. So I’ll stop there.”

Then later:

When pressed, Pullman grants that he’s not really trying to kill God, but rather the outdated idea of God as an old guy with a beard in the sky… The Narnia series, in his view, embraces a worldview that comes close to “life-hating ideology”—punishing, misogynistic, racist, and death-obsessed. By contrast, his own books are filled with a kind of warmth, an exuberance for finding utopia in this life. When he loses patience with his Christian critics, he lists the values he promotes in his own stories: tolerance, love, kindness, courage, duty, individual freedom over blind obedience.

He also talks about how his books celebrate sexual awakening - and not preteens having sex, but teenagers awakening to the knowledge of their bodies and sexuality… much like Adam and Eve eating from the tree of knowledge.

The San Francisco Chronicle published a piece on Friday, by Mark Morford, about the religious groups’ boycotts of the movie -”Jesus loves ‘His Dark Materials’: Shrill Bible-thumpers boycott ‘The Golden Compass’; world’s children grin devilishly.”

Pullman’s luminous novels have nothing to do with rejecting faith or destroying the spirit or inhibiting the exploration of what it means to be divine. They are, in fact, the exact opposite. They relish spirit and the magic of belief and love, are soaked through with divine inspiration of a kind any intelligent Christian (or honest spiritual seeker of any stripe, for that matter) should crave the way Lindsay Lohan craves cocaine. This is what makes them so incredible.

No, the nefarious thing the books aim to kill is, well, religious authority. It’s about the destruction of dogma. It’s about power, about who wants to control and manipulate life on Earth; it is about blind, ignorant, even violent adherence to insidiously narrow codes of thought and belief and behavior, sex and desire and love.

This, of course, is the God of organized religion. This is the false deity that promotes numb groupthink and inhibits growth and abhors the feminine divine (perhaps the books’ most beautiful, inspiring theme), the same paranoid, dreadful God that votes for George W. Bush because, well, he will smite the icky gays and protect us from vile pagans and Buddhists and Muslims and feminists and frumpy genius atheist British writers.

He goes on in much of the same vein. I’ll be seeing the movie; the books are good. The previews look good. Daniel Craig looks good. There are murder plots, trepanned heads in jars, a battle royale, armor-wearing polar bears, and there will have to be lots of wicked cool special effects. So we’ll see.